VARIED  TYPES 


G.K.CHESTERT 


&£ofc*.' 


VARIED   TYPES 


Varied 
'Types 


By 

G.  K.  Chesterton 

Author  of 
"  The  Defendant,"  etc. 


New  York:  Dodd,Mead 
and    Company    I9°5 


PUBLISHED  SEPTEMBER,  1903 


StacR 
Annex 


NOTE 

THESE  papers,  with  certain  alterations 
and  additions,  are  reprinted  with  the 
kind  permission  of  the  Editors  of  The 
Daily  News  and  The  Speaker. 

G.  K.  C. 
KENSINGTON. 


CONTENTS 

riai 

CHARLOTTE  BRONTE 3 

WILLIAM  MORRIS  AND  His  SCHOOL,           ....  15 

THE  OPTIMISM  OP  BYRON,           .....  29 

POPE  AND  THE  ART  OP  SATIRE, 43 

FRANCIS 59 

ROSTAND, 73 

CHARLES  II 85 

STEVENSON, 97 

THOMAS  CARLTLE 109 

TOLSTOY  AND  THE  CULT  OP  SIMPLICITY,            .       .        .  125 

SAVONAROLA 147 

THE  POSITION  OF  SIR  WALTER  SCOTT,      ....  159 

BRET  HARTE 179 

ALFRED  THE  GREAT, 199 

MAETERLINCK, ,  209 

QUEEN  VICTORIA, 217 

THE  GERMAN  EMPEROR, 237 

TENNYSON, 249 

ELIZABETH  BARRETT  BROWNING,                                      ,  261 


CHARLOTTE  BRONTE 


VARIED    TYPES 

CHARLOTTE   BRONTE 

OBJECTION  is  often  raised  against  realis- 
tic biography  because  it  reveals  so  much 
that  is  important  and  even  sacred  about  a 
man's  life.     The  real  objection  to  it  will  rather  be 
found  in  the  fact  that  it  reveals  about  a  man  the  pre- 
cise points  which  are  unimportant.     It  reveals  and 
asserts  and  insists  on  exactly  those  things  in  a  man's 
life  of  which  the  man  himself  is  wholly  unconscious ; 
his  exact  class  in  society,  the  circumstances  of  his  an- 
cestry, the  place  of  his  present  location.     These  are 
things  which  do  not,  properly  speaking,  ever  arise  be- 
fore the  human  vision.    They  do  not  occur  to  a  man's 
mind;  it  may  be  said,  with  almost  equal  truth,  that 
they  do  not  occur  in  a  man's  life.     A  man  no  more 
[3] 


VARIED    TYPES 

thinks  about  himself  as  the  inhabitant  of  the  third 
house  in  a  row  of  Brixton  villas  than  he  thinks  about 
himself  as  a  strange  animal  with  two  legs.  What  a 
man's  name  was,  what  his  income  was,  whom  he  mar- 
ried, where  he  lived,  these  are  not  sanctities ;  they  are 
irrelevancies. 

A  very  strong  case  of  this  is  the  case  of  the  Brontes. 
The  Bronte  is  in  the  position  of  the  mad  lady  in  a 
country  village;  her  eccentricities  form  an  endless 
source  of  innocent  conversation  to  that  exceedingly 
mild  and  bucolic  circle,  the  literary  world.  The  truly 
glorious  gossips  of  literature,  like  Mr.  Augustine  Bir- 
rell  and  Mr.  Andrew  Lang,  never  tire  of  collecting  all 
the  glimpses  and  anecdotes  and  sermons  and  side-lights 
and  sticks  and  straws  which  will  go  to  make  a  Bronte 
museum.  They  are  the  most  personally  discussed 
of  all  Victorian  authors,  and  the  limelight  of  biog- 
raphy has  left  few  darkened  corners  in  the  dark  old 
Yorkshire  house.  And  yet  the  whole  of  this  bio- 
graphical investigation,  though  natural  and  pictur- 
esque, is  not  wholly  suitable  to  the  Brontes.  For 
[4] 


CHARLOTTE    BRONTE 

the  Bronte  genius  was  above  all  things  deputed  to  as- 
sert the  supreme  unimportance  of  externals.  Up  to 
that  point  truth  had  always  been  conceived  as  exist- 
ing more  or  less  in  the  novel  of  manners.  Charlotte 
Bronte  electrified  the  world  by  showing  that  an  in- 
finitely older  and  more  elemental  truth  could  be  con- 
veyed by  a  novel  in  which  no  person,  good  or  bad, 
had  any  manners  at  all.  Her  work  represents  the 
first  great  assertion  that  the  humdrum  life  of  modern 
civilisation  is  a  disguise  as  tawdry  and  deceptive  as 
the  costume  of  a  bal  masque.  She  showed  that 
abysses  may  exist  inside  a  governess  and  eternities  in- 
side a  manufacturer;  her  heroine  is  the  commonplace 
spinster,  with  the  dress  of  merino  and  the  soul  of 
flame.  It  is  significant  to  notice  that  Charlotte 
Bronte,  following  consciously  or  unconsciously  the 
great  trend  of  her  genius,  was  the  first  to  take  away 
from  the  heroine  not  only  the  artificial  gold  and 
diamonds  of  wealth  and  fashion,  but  even  the  natural 
gold  and  diamonds  of  physical  beauty  and  grace. 
Instinctively  she  felt  that  the  whole  of  the  exterior 
[5] 


VARIED    TYPES 

must  be  made  ugly  that  the  whole  of  the  interior 
might  be  made  sublime.  She  chose  the  ugliest  of 
women  in  the  ugliest  of  centuries,  and  revealed  within 
them  all  the  hells  and  heavens  of  Dante. 

It  may,  therefore,  I  think,  be  legitimately  said  that 
the  externals  of  the  Brontes'  life,  though  singularly 
picturesque  in  themselves,  matter  less  than  the  ex- 
ternals of  almost  any  other  writers.  It  is  interesting 
to  know  whether  Jane  Austen  had  any  knowledge  of 
the  lives  of  the  officers  and  women  of  fashion  whom 
she  introduced  into  her  masterpieces.  It  is  interesting 
to  know  whether  Dickens  had  ever  seen  a  shipwreck 
or  been  inside  a  workhouse.  For  in  these  authors 
much  of  the  conviction  is  conveyed,  not  always  by 
adherence  to  facts,  but  always  by  grasp  of  them.  But 
the  whole  aim  and  purport  and  meaning  of  the  work 
of  the  Brontes  is  that  the  most  futile  thing  in  the 
whole  universe  is  fact.  Such  a  story  as  "  Jane  Eyre  " 
is  in  itself  so  monstrous  a  fable  that  it  ought  to  be 
excluded  from  a  book  of  fairy  tales.  The  characters 
do  not  do  what  they  ought  to  do,  nor  what  they  would 
[6] 


CHARLOTTE    BRONTE 

do,  nor  it  might  be  said,  such  is  the  insanity  of  the  at- 
mosphere, not  even  what  they  intend  to  do.  The  con- 
duct of  Rochester  is  so  primevally  and  superhumanly 
caddish  that  Bret  Harte  in  his  admirable  travesty 
scarcely  exaggerated  it.  "  Then,  resuming  his  usual 
manner,  he  threw  his  boots  at  my  head  and  withdrew," 
does  perhaps  reach  to  something  resembling  caricature. 
The  scene  in  which  Rochester  dresses  up  as  an  old 
gipsy  has  something  in  it  which  is  really  not  to  be 
found  in  any  other  branch  of  art,  except  in  the  end  of 
the  pantomime,  where  the  Emperor  turns  into  a  panta- 
loon. Yet,  despite  this  vast  nightmare  of  illusion  and 
morbidity  and  ignorance  of  the  world,  "  Jane  Eyre  " 
is  perhaps  the  truest  book  that  was  ever  written.  Its 
essential  truth  to  life  sometimes  makes  one  catch  one's 
breath.  For  it  is  not  true  to  manners,  which  are  con- 
stantly false,  or  to  facts,  which  are  almost  always 
false ;  it  is  true  to  the  only  existing  thing  which  is  true, 
emotion,  the  irreducible  minimum,  the  indestructible 
germ.  It  would  not  matter  a  single  straw  if  a  Bronte 
story  were  a  hundred  times  more  moonstruck  and  im- 


VARIED    TYPES 

probable  than  "  Jane  Eyre,"  or  a  hundred  times  more 
moonstruck  and  improbable  than  "  Wuthering 
Heights."  It  would  not  matter  if  George  Read  stood 
on  his  head,  and  Mrs.  Read  rode  on  a  dragon,  if  Fair- 
fax Rochester  had  four  eyes  and  St.  John  Rivers  three 
legs,  the  story  would  still  remain  the  truest  story  in 
the  world.  The  typical  Bronte  character  is,  indeed,  a 
kind  of  monster.  Everything  in  him  except  the  essen- 
tial is  dislocated.  His  hands  are  on  his  legs  and  his 
feet  on  his  arms,  his  nose  is  above  his  eyes,  but  his 
heart  is  in  the  right  place. 

The  great  and  abiding  truth  for  which  the  Bronte 
cycle  of  fiction  stands  is  a  certain  most  important 
truth  about  the  enduring  spirit  of  youth,  the  truth 
of  the  near  kinship  between  terror  and  joy.  The 
Bronte  heroine,  dingily  dressed,  badly  educated,  ham- 
pered by  a  humiliating  inexperience,  a  kind  of  ugly 
innocence,  is  yet,  by  the  very  fact  of  her  solitude  and 
her  gaucherie,  full  of  the  greatest  delight  that  is 
possible  to  a  human  being,  the  delight  of  expecta- 
tion, the  delight  of  an  ardent  and  flamboyant  igno- 
[8] 


CHARLOTTE    BRONTE 

ranee.  She  serves  to  show  how  futile  it  is  of  humanity 
to  suppose  that  pleasure  can  be  attained  chiefly  by 
putting  on  evening  dress  every  evening,  and  having 
a  box  at  the  theatre  every  first  night.  It  is  not  the 
man  of  pleasure  who  has  pleasure ;  it  is  not  the  man  of 
the  world  who  appreciates  the  world.  The  man  who 
has  learnt  to  do  all  conventional  things  perfectly  has 
at  the  same  time  learnt  to  do  them  prosaically.  It  is 
the  awkward  man,  whose  evening  dress  does  not  fit 
him,  whose  gloves  will  not  go  on,  whose  compliments 
will  not  come  off,  who  is  really  full  of  the  ancient 
ecstasies  of  youth.  He  is  frightened  enough  of  so- 
ciety actually  to  enjoy  his  triumphs.  He  has  that 
element  of  fear  which  is  one  of  the  eternal  ingredients 
of  joy.  This  spirit  is  the  central  spirit  of  the  Bronte 
novel.  It  is  the  epic  of  the  exhilaration  of  the  shy 
man.  As  such  it  is  of  incalculable  value  in  our  time, 
of  which  the  curse  is  that  it  does  not  take  joy  rever- 
ently because  it  does  not  take  it  fearfully.  The 
shabby  and  inconspicuous  governess  of  Charlotte 
Bronte,  with  the  small  outlook  and  the  small  creed, 
[9] 


VARIED    TYPES 

had  more  commerce  with  the  awful  and  elemental 
forces  which  drive  the  world  than  a  legion  of  law- 
less minor  poets.  She  approached  the  universe  with 
real  simplicity,  and,  consequently,  with  real  fear  and 
delight.  She  was,  so  to  speak,  shy  before  the  multi- 
tude of  the  stars,  and  in  this  she  had  possessed  herself 
of  the  only  force  which  can  prevent  enjoyment  being 
as  black  and  barren  as  routine.  The  faculty  of  being 
shy  is  the  first  and  the  most  delicate  of  the  powers  of 
enjoyment.  The  fear  of  the  Lord  is  the  beginning 
of  pleasure. 

Upon  the  whole,  therefore,  I  think  it  may  justifi- 
ably be  said  that  the  dark  wild  youth  of  the  Brontes 
in  their  dark  wild  Yorkshire  home  has  been  somewhat 
exaggerated  as  a  necessary  factor  in  their  work  and 
their  conception.  The  emotions  with  which  they 
dealt  were  universal  emotions,  emotions  of  the  morning 
of  existence,  the  springtide  joy  and  the  springtide 
terror.  Every  one  of  us  as  a  boy  or  girl  has  had  some 
midnight  dream  of  nameless  obstacle  and  unutterable 
menace,  in  which  there  was,  under  whatever  imbecile 
[10] 


CHARLOTTE    BRONTE 

forms,  all  the  deadly  stress  and  panic  of  "  Wuther- 
ing  Heights."  Every  one  of  us  has  had  a  day-dream 
of  our  own  potential  destiny  not  one  atom  more  reason- 
able than  "  Jane  Eyre."  And  the  truth  which  the 
Brontes  came  to  tell  us  is  the  truth  that  many  waters 
cannot  quench  love,  and  that  suburban  respectability 
cannot  touch  or  damp  a  secret  enthusiasm.  Clapham, 
like  every  other  earthly  city,  is  built  upon  a  volcano. 
Thousands  of  people  go  to  and  fro  in  the  wilderness  of 
bricks  and  mortar,  earning  mean  wages,  professing  a 
mean  religion,  wearing  a  mean  attire,  thousands  of 
women  who  have  never  found  any  expression  for  their 
exaltation  or  their  tragedy  but  to  go  on  working 
harder  and  yet  harder  at  dull  and  automatic  employ- 
ments, at  scolding  children  or  stitching  shirts.  But 
out  of  all  these  silent  ones  one  suddenly  became  articu- 
late, and  spoke  a  resonant  testimony,  and  her  name 
was  Charlotte  Bronte.  Spreading  around  us  upon 
every  side  to-day  like  a  huge  and  radiating  geometri- 
cal figure  are  the  endless  branches  of  the  great  city. 
There  are  times  when  we  are  almost  stricken  crazy, 

[11] 


VARIED    TYPES 

as  well  we  may  be,  by  the  multiplicity  of  those  appall- 
ing perspectives,  the  frantic  arithmetic  of  that  un- 
thinkable population.  But  this  thought  of  ours  is  in 
truth  nothing  but  a  fancy.  There  are  no  chains  of 
houses ;  there  are  no  crowds  of  men.  The  colossal  dia- 
gram of  streets  and  houses  is  an  illusion,  the  opium 
dream  of  a  speculative  builder.  Each  of  these  men 
is  supremely  solitary  and  supremely  important  to 
himself.  Each  of  these  houses  stands  in  the  centre  of 
the  world.  There  is  no  single  house  of  all  those  mil- 
lions which  has  not  seemed  to  someone  at  some  time 
the  heart  of  all  things  and  the  end  of  travel. 


[12] 


WILLIAM  MORRIS  AND  HIS  SCHOOL 


WILLIAM   MORRIS   AND   HIS   SCHOOL 

IT  is  proper  enough  that  the  unveiling  of  the 
bust  of  William  Morris  should  approximate  to  a 
public  festival,  for  while  there  have  been  many 
men  of  genius  in  the  Victorian  era  more  despotic  than 
he,  there  have  been  none  so  representative.  He  repre- 
sents not  only  that  rapacious  hunger  for  beauty 
which  has  now  for  the  first  time  become  a  serious  prob- 
lem in  the  healthy  life  of  humanity,  but  he  represents 
also  that  honourable  instinct  for  finding  beauty  in 
common  necessities  of  workmanship  which  gives  it 
a  stronger  and  more  bony  structure.  The  time  has 
passed  when  William  Morris  was  conceived  to  be  ir- 
relevant to  be  described  as  a  designer  of  wall-papers. 
If  Morris  had  been  a  hatter  instead  of  a  decorator, 
we  should  have  become  gradually  and  painfully  con- 
scious of  an  improvement  in  our  hats.  If  he  had  been 
[15] 


VARIED    TYPES 

a  tailor,  we  should  have  suddenly  found  our  frock- 
coats  trailing  on  the  ground  with  the  grandeur  of 
mediaeval  raiment.  If  he  had  been  a  shoemaker,  we 
should  have  found,  with  no  little  consternation,  our 
shoes  gradually  approximating  to  the  antique  sandal. 
As  a  hairdresser,  he  would  have  invented  some  mass- 
ing of  the  hair  worthy  to  be  the  crown  of  Venus ;  as 
an  ironmonger,  his  nails  would  have  had  some  noble 
pattern,  fit  to  be  the  nails  of  the  Cross. 

The  limitations  of  William  Morris,  whatever  they 
were,  were  not  the  limitations  of  common  decoration. 
It  is  true  that  all  his  work,  even  his  literary  work, 
was  in  some  sense  decorative,  had  in  some  degree  the 
qualities  of  a  splendid  wall-paper.  His  characters, 
his  stories,  his  religious  and  political  views,  had,  in 
the  most  emphatic  sense,  length  and  breadth  without 
thickness.  He  seemed  really  to  believe  that  men  could 
enjoy  a  perfectly  flat  felicity.  He  made  no  account 
of  the  unexplored  and  explosive  possibilities  of  hu- 
man nature,  of  the  unnameable  terrors,  and  the  yet 
more  unnameable  hopes.  So  long  as  a  man  was  grace- 
[16] 


WILLIAM    MORRIS 

ful  in  every  circumstance,  so  long  as  he  had  the  in- 
spiring consciousness  that  the  chestnut  colour  of  his 
hair  was  relieved  against  the  blue  forest  a  mile  be- 
hind, he  would  be  serenely  happy.  So  he  would  be,  no 
doubt,  if  he  were  really  fitted  for  a  decorative  exist- 
ence ;  if  he  were  a  piece  of  exquisitely  coloured  card- 
board. 

But  although  Morris  took  little  account  of  the  ter- 
rible solidity  of  human  nature — took  little  account, 
so  to  speak,  of  human  figures  in  the  round,  it  is  alto- 
gether unfair  to  represent  him  as  a  mere  aesthete.  He 
perceived  a  great  public  necessity  and  fulfilled  it  hero- 
ically. The  difficulty  with  which  he  grappled  was  one 
so  immense  that  we  shall  have  to  be  separated  from  it 
by  many  centuries  before  we  can  really  judge  of  it. 
It  was  the  problem  of  the  elaborate  and  deliberate 
ugliness  of  the  most  self-conscious  of  centuries.  Mor- 
ris at  least  saw  the  absurdity  of  the  thing.  He  felt  it 
was  monstrous  that  the  modern  man,  who  was  pre- 
eminently capable  of  realising  the  strangest  and  most 
contradictory  beauties,  who  could  feel  at  once  the 
[17] 


VARIED    TYPES 

fiery  aureole  of  the  ascetic  and  the  colossal  calm  of 
the  Hellenic  god,  should  himself,  by  a  farcical  bathos, 
be  buried  in  a  black  coat,  and  hidden  under  a  chim- 
ney-pot hat.  He  could  not  see  why  the  harmless  man 
who  desired  to  be  an  artist  in  raiment  should  be 
condemned  to  be,  at  best,  a  black  and  white  artist. 
It  is  indeed  difficult  to  account  for  the  clinging  curse 
of  ugliness  which  blights  everything  brought  forth 
by  the  most  prosperous  of  centuries.  In  all  created 
nature  there  is  not,  perhaps,  anything  so  completely 
ugly  as  a  pillar-box.  Its  shape  is  the  most  unmean- 
ing of  shapes,  its  height  and  thickness  just  neutral- 
ising each  other;  its  colour  is  the  most  repulsive  of 
colours — a  fat  and  soulless  red,  a  red  without  a  touch 
of  blood  or  fire,  like  the  scarlet  of  dead  men's  sins. 
Yet  there  is  no  reason  whatever  why  such  hideousness 
should  possess  an  object  full  of  civic  dignity,  the 
treasure-house  of  a  thousand  secrets,  the  fortress  of  a 
thousand  souls.  If  the  old  Greeks  had  had  such  an 
institution,  we  may  be  sure  that  it  would  have  been 
surmounted  by  the  severe,  but  graceful,  figure  of  the 
[18] 


WILLIAM    MORRIS 

god  of  letter-writing.  If  the  mediaeval  Christians 
has  possessed  it,  it  would  have  had  a  niche  filled  with 
the  golden  aureole  of  St.  Rowland  of  the  Postage 
Stamps.  As  it  is,  there  it  stands  at  all  our  street- 
corners,  disguising  one  of  the  most  beautiful  of  ideas 
under  one  of  the  most  preposterous  of  forms.  It  is 
useless  to  deny  that  the  miracles  of  science  have  not 
been  such  an  incentive  to  art  and  imagination  as  were 
the  miracles  of  religion.  If  men  in  the  twelfth  cen- 
tury had  been  told  that  the  lightning  had  been  driven 
for  leagues  underground,  and  had  dragged  at  its 
destroying  tail  loads  of  laughing  human  beings,  and 
if  they  had  then  been  told  that  the  people  alluded  to 
this  pulverising  portent  chirpily  as  "  The  Twopenny 
Tube,"  they  would  have  called  down  the  fire  of  Heaven 
on  us  as  a  race  of  half-witted  athiests.  Probably  they 
would  have  been  quite  right. 

This  clear  and  fine  perception  of  what  may  be  called 
the  anaesthetic  element  in  the  Victorian  era  was,  un- 
doubtedly, the  work  of  a  great  reformer:  it  requires 
a  fine  effort  of  the  imagination  to  see  an  evil  that  sur- 
[19] 


VARIED    TYPES 

rounds  us  on  every  side.  The  manner  in  which  Morris 
carried  out  his  crusade  may,  considering  the  circum- 
stances, be  called  triumphant.  Our  carpets  began  to 
bloom  under  our  feet  like  the  meadows  in  spring,  and 
our  hitherto  prosaic  stools  and  sofas  seemed  growing 
legs  and  arms  at  their  own  wild  will.  An  element  of 
freedom  and  rugged  dignity  came  in  with  plain  and 
strong  ornaments  of  copper  and  iron.  So  delicate  and 
universal  has  been  the  revolution  in  domestic  art  that 
almost  every  family  in  England  has  had  its  taste  cun- 
ningly and  treacherously  improved,  and  if  we  look 
back  at  the  early  Victorian  drawing-rooms  it  is  only 
to  realise  the  strange  but  essential  truth  that  art,  or 
human  decoration,  has,  nine  times  out  of  ten  in  his- 
tory, made  things  uglier  than  they  were  before,  from 
the  "  coiffure  "  of  a  Papuan  savage  to  the  wall-paper 
of  a  British  merchant  in  1830. 

But  great  and  beneficent  as  was  the  assthetic  revolu- 
tion of  Morris,  there  was  a  very  definite  limit  to  it.   It 
did  not  lie  only  in  the  fact  that  his  revolution  was  in 
truth  a  reaction,  though  this  was  a  partial  explana- 
[20] 


WILLIAM    MORRIS 

tion  of  his  partial  failure.  When  he  was  denouncing 
the  dresses  of  modern  ladies,  "  upholstered  like  arm- 
chairs instead  of  being  draped  like  women,"  as  he 
forcibly  expressed  it,  he  would  hold  up  for  practical 
imitation  the  costumes  and  handicrafts  of  the  Middle 
Ages.  Further  than  this  retrogressive  and  imitative 
movement  he  never  seemed  to  go.  Now,  the  men  of 
the  time  of  Chaucer  had  many  evil  qualities,  but  there 
was  at  least  one  exhibition  of  moral  weakness  they  did 
not  give.  They  would  have  laughed  at  the  idea  of 
dressing  themselves  in  the  manner  of  the  bowmen  at 
the  battle  of  Senlac,  or  painting  themselves  an 
aesthetic  blue,  after  the  custom  of  the  ancient  Britons. 
They  would  not  have  called  that  a  movement  at  all. 
Whatever  was  beautiful  in  their  dress  or  manners 
sprang  honestly  and  naturally  out  of  the  life  they  led 
and  preferred  to  lead.  And  it  may  surely  be  main- 
tained that  any  real  advance  in  the  beauty  of  modern 
dress  must  spring  honestly  and  naturally  out  of  the 
life  we  lead  and  prefer  to  lead.  We  are  not  alto- 
gether without  hints  and  hopes  of  such  a  change,  in 
[21] 


VARIED    TYPES 

the  growing  orthodoxy  of  rough  and  athletic  cos- 
tumes. But  if  this  cannot  be,  it  will  be  no  substitute 
or  satisfaction  to  turn  life  into  an  interminable  his- 
torical fancy-dress  ball. 

But  the  limitation  of  Morris's  work  lay  deeper  than 
this.  We  may  best  suggest  it  by  a  method  after  his 
own  heart.  Of  all  the  various  works  he  performed, 
none,  perhaps,  was  so  splendidly  and  solidly  valuable 
as  his  great  protest  for  the  fables  and  superstitions 
of  mankind.  He  has  the  supreme  credit  of  showing 
that  the  fairy  tales  contain  the  deepest  truth  of  the 
earth,  the  real  record  of  men's  feeling  for  things. 
Trifling  details  may  be  inaccurate,  Jack  may  not  have 
climbed  up  so  tall  a  beanstalk,  or  killed  so  tall  a  giant ; 
but  it  is  not  such  things  that  make  a  story  false ;  it  is 
a  far  different  class  of  things  that  makes  every  modern 
book  of  history  as  false  as  the  father  of  lies ;  ingenu- 
ity, self-consciousness,  hypocritical  impartiality.  It 
appears  to  us  that  of  all  the  fairy-tales  none  contains 
so  vital  a  moral  truth  as  the  old  story,  existing  in  many 
forms,  of  Beauty  and  the  Beast.  There  is  written, 
[22] 


WILLIAM    MORRIS 

with  all  the  authority  of  a  human  scripture,  the  eternal 
and  essential  truth  that  until  we  love  a  thing  in  all 
ITS  ugliness  we  cannot  make  it  beautiful.  This  was 
the  weak  point  in  William  Morris  as  a  reformer :  that 
he  sought  to  reform  modern  life,  and  that  he  hated 
modern  life  instead  of  loving  it.  Modern  London  is 
indeed  a  beast,  big  enough  and  black  enough  to  be  the 
bea;t  in  Apocalypse,  blazing  with  a  million  eyes,  and 
roaring  with  a  million  voices.  But  unless  the  poet 
can  love  this  fabulous  monster  as  he  is,  can  feel  with 
some  generous  excitement  his  massive  and  mysterious 
joie-ie-vivre,  the  vast  scale  of  his  iron  anatomy  and 
the  beating  of  his  thunderous  heart,  he  cannot  and 
will  not  change  the  beast  into  the  fairy  prince. 
Morris's  disadvantage  was  that  he  was  not  honestly 
a  child  of  the  nineteenth  century :  he  could  not  under- 
stand its  fascination,  and  consequently  he  could  not 
really  develop  it.  An  abiding  testimony  to  his  tre- 
mendous personal  influence  in  the  aesthetic  world  is  the 
vitality  and  recurrence  of  the  Arts  and  Crafts  Ex- 
hibitions, which  are  steeped  in  his  personality  like  a 
[23] 


VARIED    TYPES 

chapel  in  that  of  a  saint.  If  we  look  round  at  the  ex- 
hibits in  one  of  these  aesthetic  shows,  we  shall  be  struck 
by  the  large  mass  of  modern  objects  that  the  decora- 
tive school  leaves  untouched.  There  is  a  noble  in- 
stinct for  giving  the  right  touch  of  beauty  to  common 
and  necessary  things,  but  the  things  that  are  so 
touched  are  the  ancient  things,  the  things  that  always 
to  some  extent  commended  themselves  to  the  lover  of 
beauty.  There  are  beautiful  gates,  beautiful  foun- 
tains, beautiful  cups,  beautiful  chairs,  beautiful  read- 
ing-desks. But  there  are  no  modern  things  nade 
beautiful.  There  are  no  beautiful  lamp-posts,  beauti- 
ful letter-boxes,  beautiful  engines,  beautiful  bicycles. 
The  spirit  of  William  Morris  has  not  seized  hold  of  the 
century  and  made  its  humblest  necessities  beautiful. 
And  this  was  because,  with  all  his  healthiness  and  en- 
ergy, he  had  not  the  supreme  courage  to  face  the  ugli- 
ness of  things ;  Beauty  shrank  from  the  Beast  and  the 
fairy-tale  had  a  different  ending. 

But  herein,  indeed,  lay  Morris's  deepest  claim  to 
the  name  of  a  great  reformer:  that  he  left  his  work 
[24] 


WILLIAM   MORRIS 

incomplete.  There  is,  perhaps,  no  better  proof  that 
a  man  is  a  mere  meteor,  merely  barren  and  brilliant, 
than  that  his  work  is  done  perfectly.  A  man  like 
Morris  draws  attention  to  needs  he  cannot  supply.  In 
after-years  we  may  have  perhaps  a  newer  and  more 
daring  Arts  and  Crafts  Exhibition.  In  it  we  shall  not 
decorate  the  armour  of  the  twelfth  century,  but  the 
machinery  of  the  twentieth.  A  lamp-post  shall  be 
wrought  nobly  in  twisted  iron,  fit  to  hold  the  sanctity 
of  fire.  A  pillar-box  shall  be  carved  with  figures  em- 
blematical of  the  secrets  of  comradeship  and  the 
silence  and  honour  of  the  State.  Railway  signals,  of 
all  earthly  things  the  most  poetical,  the  coloured  stars 
of  life  and  death,  shall  be  lamps  of  green  and  crim- 
son worthy  of  their  terrible  and  faithful  service.  But 
if  ever  this  gradual  and  genuine  movement  of  our  time 
towards  beauty — not  backwards,  but  forwards — does 
truly  come  about,  Morris  will  be  the  first  prophet  of 
it.  Poet  of  the  childhood  of  nations,  craftsman  in 
the  new  honesties  of  art,  prophet  of  a  merrier  and 
wiser  life,  his  full-blooded  enthusiasm  will  be  remem- 
[25] 


bered  when  human  life  has  once  more  assumed  flam- 
boyant colours  and  proved  that  this  painful  greenish 
grey  of  the  aesthetic  twilight  in  which  we  now  live  is, 
in  spite  of  all  the  pessimists,  not  of  the  greyness  of 
death,  but  the  greyness  of  dawn. 


[*6J 


OPTIMISM  OF  BYRON 


E 


THE  OPTIMISM   OF  BYRON 

VERYTHING  is  against  our  appreciating 
the  spirit  and  the  age  of  Byron.  The  age 
A  that  has  just  passed  from  us  is  always  like  a 
dream  when  we  wake  in  the  morning,  a  thing  incred- 
ible and  centuries  away.  And  the  world  of  Byron 
seems  a  sad  and  faded  world,  a  weird  and  inhuman 
world,  where  men  were  romantic  in  whiskers,  ladies 
lived,  apparently,  in  bowers,  and  the  very  word  has 
the  sound  of  a  piece  of  stage  scenery.  Roses  and 
nightingales  recur  in  their  poetry  with  the  monoto- 
nous elegance  of  a  wall-paper  pattern.  The  whole  is 
like  a  revel  of  dead  men,  a  revel  with  splendid  vesture 
and  half-witted  faces. 

But  the  more  shrewdly  and  earnestly  we  study  the 
histories  of  men,  the  less  ready  shall  we  be  to  make  use 
of  the  word  "  artificial."     Nothing  in  the  world  has 
[29] 


VARIED    TYPES 

ever  been  artificial.  Many  customs,  many  dresses, 
many  works  of  art  are  branded  with  artificiality  be- 
cause they  exhibit  vanity  and  self -consciousness :  as 
if  vanity  were  not  a  deep  and  elemental  thing, 
like  love  and  hate  and  the  fear  of  death.  Vanity  may 
be  found  in  darkling  deserts,  in  the  hermit  and  in  the 
wild  beasts  that  crawl  around  him.  It  may  be  good  or 
evil,  but  assuredly  it  is  not  artificial :  vanity  is  a  voice 
out  of  the  abyss. 

The  remarkable  fact  is,  however,  and  it  bears 
strongly  on  the  present  position  of  Byron,  that  when 
a  thing  is  unfamiliar  to  us,  when  it  is  remote  and  the 
product  of  some  other  age  or  spirit,  we  think  it  not 
savage  or  terrible,  but  merely  artificial.  There  are 
many  instances  of  this :  a  fair  one  is  the  case  of  trop- 
ical plants  and  birds.  When  we  see  some  of  the  mon- 
strous and  flamboyant  blossoms  that  enrich  the 
equatorial  woods,  we  do  not  feel  that  they  are  con- 
flagrations of  nature ;  silent  explosions  of  her  fright- 
ful energy.  We  simply  find  it  hard  to  believe  that 
they  are  not  wax  flowers  grown  under  a  glass  case. 
[30] 


THE    OPTIMISM    OF    BYRON 

When  we  see  some  of  the  tropic  birds,  with  their  tiny 
bodies  attached  to  gigantic  beaks,  we  do  not  feel  that 
they  are  freaks  of  the  fierce  humour  of  Creation.  We 
almost  believe  that  they  are  toys  out  of  a  child's  play- 
box,  artificially  carved  and  artificially  coloured.  So  it 
is  with  the  great  convulsion  of  Nature  which  was 
known  as  Byronism.  The  volcano  is  not  an  extinct 
volcano  now ;  it  is  the  dead  stick  of  a  rocket.  It  is  the 
remains  not  of  a  natural  but  of  an  artificial  fire. 

But  Byron  and  Byronism  were  something  im- 
measurably greater  than  anything  that  is  represented 
by  such  a  view  as  this:  their  real  value  and  meaning 
are  indeed  little  understood.  The  first  of  the  mistakes 
about  Byron  lies  in  the  fact  that  he  is  treated  as  a 
pessimist.  True,  he  treated  himself  as  such,  but  a 
critic  can  hardly  have  even  a  slight  knowledge  of 
Byron  without  knowing  that  he  had  the  smallest 
amount  of  knowledge  of  himself  that  ever  fell  to  the 
lot  of  an  intelligent  man.  The  real  character  of  what 
is  known  as  Byron's  pessimism  is  better  worth  study 
than  any  real  pessimism  could  ever  be. 
[31] 


VARIED    TYPES 

It  is  the  standing  peculiarity  of  this  curious  world 
of  ours  that  almost  everything  in  it  has  been  extolled 
enthusiastically  and  invariably  extolled  to  the  disad- 
vantage of  everything  else. 

One  after  another  almost  every  one  of  the  phe- 
nomena of  the  universe  has  been  declared  to  be  alone 
capable  of  making  life  worth  living.  Books,  love, 
business,  religion,  alcohol,  abstract  truth,  private  emo- 
tion, money,  simplicity,  mysticism,  hard  work,  a  life 
close  to  nature,  a  life  close  to  Belgrave  Square  are 
every  one  of  them  passionately  maintained  by  some- 
body to  be  so  good  that  they  redeem  the  evil  of  an 
otherwise  indefensible  world.  Thus,  while  the  world 
is  almost  always  condemned  in  summary,  it  is  al- 
ways justified,  and  indeed  extolled,  in  detail  after 
detail. 

Existence  has  been  praised  and  absolved  by  a  chorus 
of  pessimists.  The  work  of  giving  thanks  to  Heaven 
is,  as  it  were,  divided  ingeniously  among  them. 
Schopenhauer  is  told  off  as  a  kind  of  librarian  in  the 
House  of  God,  to  sing  the  praises  of  the  austere  pleas- 
[32] 


THE    OPTIMISM    OF    BYRON 

ures  of  the  mind.  Carlyle,  as  steward,  undertakes  the 
working  department  and  eulogises  a  life  of  labour  in 
the  fields.  Omar  Khayyam  is  established  in  the  cellar, 
and  swears  that  it  is  the  only  room  in  the  house.  Even 
the  blackest  of  pessimistic  artists  enjoys  his  art.  At 
the  precise  moment  that  he  has  written  some  shame- 
less and  terrible  indictment  of  Creation,  his  one  pang 
of  joy  in  the  achievement  joins  the  universal  chorus 
of  gratitude,  with  the  scent  of  the  wild  flower  and  the 
song  of  the  bird. 

Now  Byron  had  a  sensational  popularity,  and  that 
popularity  was,  as  far  as  words  and  explanations  go, 
founded  upon  his  pessimism.  He  was  adored  by  an 
overwhelming  majority,  almost  every  individual  of 
which  despised  the  majority  of  mankind.  But  when 
we  come  to  regard  the  matter  a  little  more  deeply  we 
tend  in  some  degree  to  cease  to  believe  in  this  popu- 
larity of  the  pessimist.  The  popularity  of  pure  and 
unadulterated  pessimism  is  an  oddity;  it  is  almost  a 
contradiction  in  terms.  Men  would  no  more  receive 
the  news  of  the  failure  of  existence  or  of  the  har- 
[33] 


VARIED    TYPES 

monious  hostility  of  the  stars  with  ardour  or  popular 
rejoicing  than  they  would  light  bonfires  for  the  arrival 
of  cholera  or  dance  a  breakdown  when  they  were  con- 
demned to  be  hanged.  When  the  pessimist  is  popular 
it  must  always  be  not  because  he  shows  all  things  to 
be  bad,  but  because  he  shows  some  things  to  be 
good. 

Men  can  only  join  in  a  chorus  of  praise,  even  if  it  is 
the  praise  of  denunciation.  The  man  who  is  popular 
must  be  optimistic  about  something,  even  if  he  is  only 
optimistic  about  pessimism.  And  this  was  emphat- 
ically the  case  with  Byron  and  the  Byronists.  Their 
real  popularity  was  founded  not  upon  the  fact  that 
they  blamed  everything,  but  upon  the  fact  that  they 
praised  something.  They  heaped  curses  upon  man, 
but  they  used  man  merely  as  a  foil.  The  things  they 
wished  to  praise  by  comparison  were  the  energies  of 
Nature.  Man  was  to  them  what  talk  and  fashion 
were  to  Carlyle,  what  philosophical  and  religious 
quarrels  were  to  Omar,  what  the  whole  race  after  prac- 
tical happiness  was  to  Schopenhauer,  the  thing  which 


THE    OPTIMISM    OF    BYRON 

must  be  censured  in  order  that  somebody  else  may  be 
exalted.  It  was  merely  a  recognition  of  the  fact  that 
one  cannot  write  in  white  chalk  except  on  a  black- 
board. 

Surely  it  is  ridiculous  to  maintain  seriously  that 
Byron's  love  of  the  desolate  and  inhuman  in  nature 
was  the  mark  of  vital  scepticism  and  depression. 
When  a  young  man  can  elect  deliberately  to  walk 
alone  in  winter  by  the  side  of  the  shattering  sea,  when 
he  takes  pleasure  in  storms  and  stricken  peaks,  and 
the  lawless  melancholy  of  the  older  earth,  we  may 
deduce  with  the  certainty  of  logic  that  he  is  very 
young  and  very  happy.  There  is  a  certain  darkness 
which  we  see  in  wine  when  seen  in  shadow;  we  see  it 
again  in  the  night  that  has  just  buried  a  gorgeous 
sunset.  The  wine  seems  black,  and  yet  at  the  same 
time  powerfully  and  almost  impossibly  red;  the  sky 
seems  black,  and  yet  at  the  same  time  to  be  only  too 
dense  a  blend  of  purple  and  green.  Such  was  the 
darkness  which  lay  around  the  Byronic  school.  Dark- 
ness with  them  was  only  too  dense  a  purple.  They 
[35] 


VARIED    TYPES 

would  prefer  the  sullen  hostility  of  the  earth  because 
amid  all  the  cold  and  darkness  their  own  hearts  were 
flaming  like  their  own  firesides. 

Matters  are  very  different  with  the  more  modern 
school  of  doubt  and  lamentation.  The  last  movement 
of  pessimism  is  perhaps  expressed  in  Mr.  Aubrey 
Beardsley's  allegorical  designs.  Here  we  have  to  deal 
with  a  pessimism  which  tends  naturally  not  towards 
the  oldest  elements  of  the  cosmos,  but  towards  the  last 
and  most  fantastic  fripperies  of  artificial  life.  By- 
ronism  tended  towards  the  desert;  the  new  pessimism 
towards  the  restaurant.  Byronism  was  a  revolt 
against  artificiality;  the  new  pessimism  is  a  revolt  in 
its  favour. 

The  Byronic  young  man  had  an  affectation  of 
sincerity;  the  decadent,  going  a  step  deeper  into  the 
avenues  of  the  unreal,  has  positively  an  affecta- 
tion of  affectation.  And  it  is  by  their  fopperies  and 
their  frivolities  that  we  know  that  their  sinister  philos- 
ophy is  sincere ;  in  their  lights  and  garlands  and  rib- 
bons we  read  their  indwelling  despair.  It  was  so,  in- 
[36] 


THE    OPTIMISM    OF    BYRON 

deed,  with  Byron  himself;  his  really  bitter  moments 
were  his  frivolous  moments.  He  went  on  year  after 
year  calling  down  fire  upon  mankind,  summoning  the 
deluge  and  the  destructive  sea  and  all  the  ultimate 
energies  of  nature  to  sweep  away  the  cities  of  the 
spawn  of  man.  But  through  all  this  his  subconscious 
mind  was  not  that  of  a  despairer;  on  the  contrary, 
there  is  something  of  a  kind  of  lawless  faith  in  thus 
parleying  with  such  immense  and  immemorial  bru- 
talities. It  was  not  until  the  time  in  which  he  wrote 
"  Don  Juan  "  that  he  really  lost  this  inward  warmth 
and  geniality,  and  a  sudden  shout  of  hilarious  laugh- 
ter announced  to  the  world  that  Lord  Byron  had 
really  become  a  pessimist. 

One  of  the  best  tests  in  the  world  of  what  a  poet 
really  means  is  his  metre.  He  may  be  a  hypocrite  in 
his  metaphysics,  but  he  cannot  be  a  hypocrite  in  his 
prosody.  And  all  the  time  that  Byron's  language  is 
of  horror  and  emptiness,  his  metre  is  a  bounding  pas 
de  quatre.  He  may  arraign  existence  on  the  most 
deadly  charges,  he  may  condemn  it  with  the  most 
[37] 


VARIED    TYPES 

desolating  verdict,  but  he  cannot  alter  the  fact  that 
on  some  walk  in  a  spring  morning  when  all  the  limbs 
are  swinging  and  all  the  blood  alive  in  the  body,  the 
lips  may  be  caught  repeating: 

"  Oh,  there's  not  a  joy  the  world  can  give  like  that  it  takes  away, 
When  the  glow  of  early  youth  declines  in  beauty's  dull  decay; 
"Tis  not  upon  the  cheek  of  youth  the  blush  that  fades  so  fast, 
But  the  tender  bloom  of  heart  is  gone  ere  youth  itself  be  past." 

That  automatic  recitation  is  the  answer  to  the  whole 
pessimism  of  Byron. 

The  truth  is  that  Byron  was  one  of  a  class  who 
may  be  called  the  unconscious  optimists,  who  are  very 
often,  indeed,  the  most  uncompromising  conscious 
pessimists,  because  the  exuberance  of  their  nature  de- 
mands for  an  adversary  a  dragon  as  big  as  the  world. 
But  the  whole  of  his  essential  and  unconscious  being 
was  spirited  and  confident,  and  that  unconscious 
being,  long  disguised  and  buried  under  emotional  arti- 
fices, suddenly  sprang  into  prominence  in  the  face  of 
a  cold,  hard,  political  necessity.  In  Greece  he  heard 
the  cry  of  reality,  and  at  the  time  that  he  was  dying, 
[38] 


THE    OPTIMISM    OF    BYRON 

he  began  to  live.  He  heard  suddenly  the  call  of  that 
buried  and  subconscious  happiness  which  is  in  all  of 
us,  and  which  may  emerge  suddenly  at  the  sight 
of  the  grass  of  a  meadow  or  the  spears  of  the 
enemy. 


[39] 


POPE  AND  THE  ART  OF  SATIRE 


POPE   AND   THE   ART   OF   SATIRE 


^  """^HE  general  critical  theory  common  in  this 
and  the  last  century  is  that  it  was  very 
easy  for  the  imitators  of  Pope  to  write 
English  poetry.  The  classical  couplet  was  a  thing 
that  anyone  could  do.  So  far  as  that  goes,  one  may 
justifiably  answer  by  asking  anyone  to  try.  It  may 
be  easier  really  to  have  wit,  than  really,  in  the  boldest 
and  most  enduring  sense,  to  have  imagination.  But 
it  is  immeasurably  easier  to  pretend  to  have  imagina- 
tion than  to  pretend  to  have  wit.  A  man  may  in- 
dulge in  a  sham  rhapsody,  because  it  may  be  the  tri- 
umph of  a  rhapsody  to  be  unintelligible.  But  a  man 
cannot  indulge  in  a  sham  joke,  because  it  is  the  ruin 
of  a  joke  to  be  unintelligible.  A  man  may  pretend 
to  be  a  poet :  he  can  no  more  pretend  to  be  a  wit  than 
he  can  pretend  to  bring  rabbits  out  of  a  hat  without 
[43] 


VARIED    TYPES 

having  learnt  to  be  a  conjuror.  Therefore,  it  may 
be  submitted,  there  was  a  certain  discipline  in  the  old 
antithetical  couplet  of  Pope  and  his  followers.  If  it 
did  not  permit  of  the  great  liberty  of  wisdom  used 
by  the  minority  of  great  geniuses,  neither  did  it  per- 
mit of  the  great  liberty  of  folly  which  is  used  by  the 
majority  of  small  writers.  A  prophet  could  not  be 
a  poet  in  those  days,  perhaps,  but  at  least  a  fool  could 
not  be  a  poet.  If  we  take,  for  the  sake  of  example, 
such  a  line  as  Pope's: 

"  Damn  with  faint  praise,  assent  with  civil  leer," 

the  test  is  comparatively  simple.  A  great  poet  would 
not  have  written  such  a  line,  perhaps.  But  a  minor 
poet  could  not. 

Supposing  that  a  lyric  poet  of  the  new  school  really 
had  to  deal  with  such  an  idea  as  that  expressed  in 
Pope's  line  about  Man: 

"  A  being  darkly  wise  and  rudely  great," 

Is  it  really  so  certain  that  he  would  go  deeper  into 
the  matter  than  that  old  antithetical  jingle  goes?     I 
[44] 


POPE 

venture  to  doubt  whether  he  would  really  be  any  wiser 
or  weirder  or  more  imaginative  or  more  profound. 
The  one  thing  that  he  would  really  be,  would  be 
longer.  Instead  of  writing, 

"A  being  darkly  wise  and  rudely  great," 

the  contemporary  poet,  in  his  elaborately  ornamented 
book  of  verses,  would  produce  something  like  the  fol- 
lowing : 

"A  creature 
Of  feature 

More  dark,  more  dark,  more  dark  than  skies, 
Yea,  darkly  wise,  yea,  darkly  wise: 
Darkly  wise  as  a  formless  fate. 
And  if  he  be  great, 
If  he  be  great,  then  rudely  great, 
Rudely  great  as  a  plough  that  plies, 
And  darkly  wise,  and  darkly  wise." 

Have  we  really  learnt  to  think  more  broadly?  Or 
have  we  only  learnt  to  spread  our  thoughts  thinner? 
I  have  a  dark  suspicion  that  a  modern  poet  might 
manufacture  an  admirable  lyric  out  of  almost  every 
line  of  Pope. 

There  is,  of  course,  an  idea  in  our  time  that  the 
[45] 


VARIED    TYPES 

very  antithesis  of  the  typical  line  of  Pope  is  a  mark 
of  artificiality.  I  shall  have  occasion  more  than  once 
to  point  out  that  nothing  in  the  world  has  ever  been 
artificial.  But  certainly  antithesis  is  not  artificial. 
An  element  of  paradox  runs  through  the  whole  of 
existence  itself.  It  begins  in  the  realm  of  ultimate 
physics  and  metaphysics,  in  the  two  facts  that  we 
cannot  imagine  a  space  that  is  infinite,  and  that  we 
cannot  imagine  a  space  that  is  finite.  It  runs  through 
the  inmost  complications  of  divinity,  in  that  we  can- 
not conceive  that  Christ  in  the  wilderness  was  truly 
pure,  unless  we  also  conceive  that  he  desired  to  sin. 
It  runs,  in  the  same  manner,  through  all  the  minor 
matters  of  morals,  so  that  we  cannot  imagine  courage 
existing  except  in  conjunction  with  fear,  or  mag- 
nanimity existing  except  in  conjunction  with  some 
temptation  to  meanness.  If  Pope  and  his  followers 
caught  this  echo  of  natural  irrationality,  they  were 
not  any  the  more  artificial.  Their  antitheses  were 
fully  in  harmony  with  existence,  which  is  itself  a  con- 
tradiction in  terms. 

[46] 


POPE 

Pope  was  really  a  great  poet ;  he  was  the  last  great 
poet  of  civilisation.  Immediately  after  the  fall  of 
him  and  his  school  come  Burns  and  Byron,  and  the 
reaction  towards  the  savage  and  the  elemental.  But 
to  Pope  civilisation  was  still  an  exciting  experiment. 
Its  perruques  and  ruffles  were  to  him  what  feathers 
and  bangles  are  to  a  South  Sea  Islander — the  real 
romance  of  civilisation.  And  in  all  the  forms  of  art 
which  peculiarly  belong  to  civilisation,  he  was  su- 
preme. In  one  especially  he  was  supreme — the  great 
and  civilised  art  of  satire.  And  in  this  we  have  fallen 
away  utterly. 

We  have  had  a  great  revival  in  our  time  of  the  cult 
of  violence  and  hostility.  Mr.  Henley  and  his  young 
men  have  an  infinite  number  of  furious  epithets  with 
which  to  overwhelm  anyone  who  differs  from  them. 
It  is  not  a  placid  or  untroubled  position  to  be  Mr. 
Henley's  enemy,  though  we  know  that  it  is  certainly 
safer  than  to  be  his  friend.  And  yet,  despite  all  this, 
these  people  produce  no  satire.  Political  and  social 
satire  is  a  lost  art,  like  pottery  and  stained  glass.  It 
[47] 


VARIED    TYPES 

may  be  worth  while  to  make  some  attempt  to  point  out 
a  reason  for  this. 

It  may  seem  a  singular  observation  to  say  that  we 
are  not  generous  enough  to  write  great  satire.  This, 
however,  is  approximately  a  very  accurate  way  of 
describing  the  case.  To  write  great  satire,  to  attack 
a  man  so  that  he  feels  the  attack  and  half  acknowl- 
edges its  justice,  it  is  necessary  to  have  a  certain  in- 
tellectual magnanimity  which  realises  the  merits  of 
the  opponent  as  well  as  his  defects.  This  is,  indeed, 
only  another  way  of  putting  the  simple  truth  that  in 
order  to  attack  an  army  we  must  know  not  only  its 
weak  points,  but  also  its  strong  points.  England 
in  the  present  season  and  spirit  fails  in  satire  for  the 
same  simple  reason  that  it  fails  in  war :  it  despises  the 
enemy.  In  matters  of  battle  and  conquest  we  have 
got  firmly  rooted  in  our  minds  the  idea  (an  idea  fit 
for  the  philosophers  of  Bedlam)  that  we  can  best 
trample  on  a  people  by  ignoring  all  the  particular 
merits  which  give  them  a  chance  of  trampling  upon 
us.  It  has  become  a  breach  of  etiquette  to  praise  the 
[48] 


POPE 

enemy ;  whereas,  when  the  enemy  is  strong,  every 
honest  scout  ought  to  praise  the  enemy.  It  is  impos- 
sible to  vanquish  an  army  without  having  a  full  ac- 
count of  its  strength.  It  is  impossible  to  satirise  a 
man  without  having  a  full  account  of  his  virtues.  It  is 
too  much  the  custom  in  politics  to  describe  a  political 
opponent  as  utterly  inhuman,  as  utterly  careless  of 
his  country,  as  utterly  cynical,  which  no  man  ever 
was  since  the  beginning  of  the  world.  This  kind  of 
invective  may  often  have  a  great  superficial  success :  it 
may  hit  the  mood  of  the  moment ;  it  may  raise  excite- 
ment and  applause;  it  may  impress  millions.  But 
there  is  one  man  among  all  those  millions  whom  it  does 
not  impress,  whom  it  hardly  ever  touches ;  that  is  the 
man  against  whom  it  is  directed.  The  one  person 
for  whom  the  whole  satire  has  been  written  in  vain 
is  the  man  whom  it  is  the  whole  object  of  the  in- 
stitution of  satire  to  reach.  He  knows  that  such  a 
description  of  him  is  not  true.  He  knows  that  he  is 
not  utterly  unpatriotic,  or  utterly  self-seeking,  or  ut- 
terly barbarous  and  revengeful.  He  knows  that  he 
[49] 


VARIED    TYPES 

is  an  ordinary  man,  and  that  he  can  count  as  many 
kindly  memories,  as  many  humane  instincts,  as  many 
hours  of  decent  work  and  responsibility  as  any  other 
ordinary  man.  But  behind  all  this  he  has  his  real 
weaknesses,  the  real  ironies  of  his  soul:  behind  all 
these  ordinary  merits  lie  the  mean  compromises,  the 
craven  silences,  the  sullen  vanities,  the  secret  brutal- 
ities, the  unmanly  visions  of  revenge.  It  is  to  these 
that  satire  should  reach  if  it  is  to  touch  the  man  at 
whom  it  is  aimed.  And  to  reach  these  it  must  pass  and 
salute  a  whole  army  of  virtues. 

If  we  turn  to  the  great  English  satirists  of  the 
seventeenth  and  eighteenth  centuries,  for  example,  we 
find  that  they  had  this  rough,  but  firm,  grasp  of  the 
size  and  strength,  the  value  and  the  best  points  of 
their  adversary.  Dryden,  before  hewing  Ahitophel 
in  pieces,  gives  a  splendid  and  spirited  account  of  the 
insane  valour  and  inspired  cunning  of  the 

"  daring  pilot  in  extremity," 

who  was  more  untrustworthy  in  calm  than  in  storm, 
and 

[50] 


POPE 

"  Steered  too  near  the  rocks  to  boast  his  wit." 

The  whole  is,  so  far  as  it  goes,  a  sound  and  pictur- 
esque version  of  the  great  Shaftesbury.  It  would,  in 
many  waj^s,  serve  as  a  very  sound  and  picturesque  ac- 
count of  Lord  Randolph  Churchill.  But  here  comes 
in  very  pointedly  the  difference  between  our  modern 
attempts  at  satire  and  the  ancient  achievement  of  it. 
The  opponents  of  Lord  Randolph  Churchill,  both 
Liberal  and  Conservative,  did  not  satirise  him  nobly 
and  honestly,  as  one  of  those  great  wits  to  madness 
near  allied.  They  represented  him  as  a  mere  puppy, 
a  silly  and  irreverent  upstart  whose  impudence  sup- 
plied the  lack  of  policy  and  character.  Churchill  had 
grave  and  even  gross  faults,  a  certain  coarseness,  a 
certain  hard  boyish  assertiveness,  a  certain  lack  of 
magnanimity,  a  certain  peculiar  patrician  vulgarity. 
But  he  was  a  much  larger  man  than  satire  depicted 
him,  and  therefore  the  satire  could  not  and  did  not 
overwhelm  him.  And  here  we  have  the  cause  of  the 
failure  of  contemporary  satire,  that  it  has  no  mag- 
nanimity, that  is  to  say,  no  patience.  It  cannot  en- 
[51] 


VARIED    TYPES 

dure  to  be  told  that  its  opponent  has  his  strong  points, 
just  as  Mr.  Chamberlain  could  not  endure  to  be  told 
that  the  Boers  had  a  regular  army.  It  can  be  content 
with  nothing  except  persuading  itself  that  its  oppo- 
nent is  utterly  bad  or  utterly  stupid — that  is,  that  he 
is  what  he  is  not  and  what  nobody  else  is.  If  we  take 
any  prominent  politician  of  the  day — such,  for  ex- 
ample, as  Sir  William  Harcourt — we  shall  find  that 
this  is  the  point  in  which  all  party  invective  fails. 
The  Tory  satire  at  the  expense  of  Sir  William  Har- 
court is  always  desperately  endeavouring  to  represent 
that  he  is  inept,  that  he  makes  a  fool  of  himself,  that 
he  is  disagreeable  and  disgraceful  and  untrustworthy. 
The  defect  of  all  that  is  that  we  all  know  that  it  is 
untrue.  Everyone  knows  that  Sir  William  Harcourt 
is  not  inept,  but  is  almost  the  ablest  Parliamentarian 
now  alive.  Everyone  knows  that  he  is  not  disagreeable 
or  disgraceful,  but  a  gentleman  of  the  old  school  who 
is  on  excellent  social  terms  with  his  antagonists. 
Everyone  knows  that  he  is  not  untrustworthy,  but  a 
man  of  unimpeachable  honour  who  is  much  trusted. 
[52] 


POPE 

Above  all,  he  knows  it  himself,  and  is  therefore 
affected  by  the  satire  exactly  as  any  one  of  us  would 
be  if  we  were  accused  of  being  black  or  of  keeping  a 
shop  for  the  receiving  of  stolen  goods.  We  might  be 
angry  at  the  libel,  but  not  at  the  satire :  for  a  man  is 
angry  at  a  libel  because  it  is  false,  but  at  a  satire 
because  it  is  true. 

Mr.  Henley  and  his  young  men  are  very  fond  of 
invective  and  satire ;  if  they  wish  to  know  the  reason 
of  their  failure  in  these  things,  they  need  only  turn 
to  the  opening  of  Pope's  superb  attack  upon  Addison. 
The  Henleyite's  idea  of  satirising  a  man  is  to  express 
a  violent  contempt  for  him,  and  by  the  heat  of  this 
to  persuade  others  and  himself  that  the  man  is  con- 
temptible. I  remember  reading  a  satiric  attack  on 
Mr.  Gladstone  by  one  of  the  young  anarchic  Tories, 
which  began  by  asserting  that  Mr.  Gladstone  was  a 
bad  public  speaker.  If  these  people  would,  as  I 
have  said,  go  quietly  and  read  Pope's  "  Atticus,"  they 
would  see  how  a  great  satirist  approaches  a  great 
enemy : 

[53] 


VARIED    TYPES 

41  Peace  to  all  such!    But  were  there  one  whose  fires 
True  genius  kindles,  and  fair  fame  inspires, 
Blest  with  each  talent,  and  each  art  to  please, 
And  born  to  write,  converse,  and  live  with  ease. 
Should  such  a  man " 

And  then  follows  the  torrent  of  that  terrible  criticism. 
Pope  was  not  such  a  fool  as  to  try  to  make  out  that 
Addison  was  a  fool.  He  knew  that  Addison  was  not 
a  fool,  and  he  knew  that  Addison  knew  it.  But 
hatred,  in  Pope's  case,  had  become  so  great  and,  I  was 
almost  going  to  say,  so  pure,  that  it  illuminated  all 
things,  as  love  illuminates  all  things.  He  said  what 
was  really  wrong  with  Addison ;  and  in  calm  and  clear 
and  everlasting  colours  he  painted  the  picture  of  the 
evil  of  the  literary  temperament: 

"  Bear,  like  the  Turk,  no  brother  near  the  throne, 
View  him  with  scornful,  yet  with  jealous  eyes, 
And  hate  for  arts  that  caused  himself  to  rise. 

Like  Cato  give  his  little  Senate  laws, 
And  sit  attentive  to  his  own  applause. 
While  wits  and  templars  every  sentence  raise, 
And  wonder  with  a  foolish  face  of  praise." 

This  is  the  kind  of  thing  which  really  goes  to  the 

[54] 


POPE 

mark  at  which  it  aims.  It  is  penetrated  with  sorrow 
and  a  kind  of  reverence,  and  it  is  addressed  directly 
to  a  man.  This  is  no  mock-tournament  to  gain  the 
applause  of  the  crowd.  It  is  a  deadly  duel  by  the 
lonely  seashore. 

In  current  political  materialism  there  is  everywhere 
the  assumption  that,  without  understanding  anything 
of  his  case  or  his  merits,  we  can  benefit  a  man  prac- 
tically. Without  understanding  his  case  and  his 
merits,  we  cannot  even  hurt  him. 


FRANCIS 


FRANCIS 

A:ETICISM  is  a  thing  which,  in  its  very 
nature,  we  tend  in  these  days  to  misunder- 
stand. Asceticism,  in  the  religious  sense,  is 
the  repudiation  of  the  great  mass  of  human  joys  be- 
cause of  the  supreme  joy  fulness  of  the  one  joy,  the 
religious  joy.  But  asceticism  is  not  in  the  least  con- 
fined to  religious  asceticism:  there  is  scientific  asceti- 
cism which  asserts  that  truth  is  alone  satisfying :  there 
is  aesthetic  asceticism  which  asserts  that  art  is  alone 
satisfying:  there  is  amatory  asceticism  which  asserts 
that  love  is  alone  satisfying.  There  is  even  epicurean 
asceticism,  which  asserts  that  beer  and  skittles  are 
alone  satisfying.  Wherever  the  manner  of  praising 
anything  involves  the  statement  that  the  speaker 
could  live  with  that  thing  alone,  there  lies  the  germ 
and  essence  of  asceticism.  When  William  Morris,  for 
[59] 


VARIED    TYPES 

example,  says  that  "  love  is  enough,"  it  is  obvious  that 
he  asserts  in  those  words  that  art,  science,  politics, 
ambition,  money,  houses,  carriages,  concerts,  gloves, 
walking-sticks,  door-knockers,  railway-stations,  cathe- 
drals, and  any  other  things  one  may  choose  to  tabulate 
are  unnecessary.  When  Omar  Khayyam  says: 

"A  book  of  verses  underneath  the  bough, 
A  loaf  of  bread,  a  jug  of  wine,  and  thou 
Beside  me  singing  in  the  wilderness — 
O  wilderness  were  Paradise  enow." 

It  is  clear  that  he  speaks  fully  as  much  ascetically  as 
he  does  aesthetically.  He  makes  a  list  of  things  and 
says  that  he  wants  no  more.  The  same  thing  was 
done  by  a  mediaeval  monk.  Examples  might,  of 
course,  be  multiplied  a  hundred-fold.  One  of  the 
most  genuinely  poetical  of  our  younger  poets  says, 
as  the  one  thing  certain,  that 

"  From  quiet  home  and  first  beginning 

Out  to  the  undiscovered  ends— 
There's  nothing  worth  the  wear  of  winning 
But  laughter  and  the  love  of  friends." 

Here  we  have  a  perfect  example  of  the  main  important 
[60] 


FRANCIS 

fact,  that  all  true  joy  expresses  itself  In  terms  of 
asceticism. 

But  if,  in  any  case,  it  should  happen  that  a  class 
or  a  generation  lose  the  sense  of  the  peculiar  kind  of 
joy  which  is  being  celebrated,  they  immediately  begin 
to  call  the  enjoyers  of  that  joy  gloomy  and  self- 
destroying.  The  most  formidable  liberal  philosophers 
have  called  the  monks  melancholy  because  they  denied 
themselves  the  pleasures  of  liberty  and  marriage. 
They  might  as  well  call  the  trippers  on  a  Bank  Holi- 
day melancholy  because  they  deny  themselves,  as  a 
rule,  the  pleasures  of  silence  and  meditation.  A  sim- 
pler and  stronger  example  is,  however,  to  hand.  If 
ever  it  should  happen  that  the  system  of  English  ath- 
letics should  vanish  from  the  public  schools  and  the 
universities,  if  science  should  supply  some  new  and 
non-competitive  manner  of  perfecting  the  physique, 
if  public  ethics  swung  round  to  an  attitude  of  abso- 
lute contempt  and  indifference  towards  the  feeling 
called  sport,  then  it  is  easy  to  see  what  would  happen. 
Future  historians  would  simply  state  that  in  the  dark 
[61] 


VARIED    TYPES 

days  of  Queen  Victoria  young  men  at  Oxford  and 
Cambridge  were  subjected  to  a  horrible  sort  of  re- 
ligious torture.  They  were  forbidden,  by  fantastic 
monastic  rules,  to  indulge  in  wine  or  tobacco  during 
certain  arbitrarily  fixed  periods  of  time,  before  certain 
brutal  fights  and  festivals.  Bigots  insisted  on  their 
rising  at  unearthly  hours  and  running  violently 
around  fields  for  no  object.  Many  men  ruined  their 
health  in  these  dens  of  superstition,  many  died  there. 
All  this  is  perfectly  true  and  irrefutable.  Athleti- 
cism in  England  is  an  asceticism,  as  much  as  the 
monastic  rules.  Men  have  overstrained  themselves 
and  killed  themselves  through  English  athleticism. 
There  is  one  difference  and  one  only:  we  do  feel  the 
love  of  sport;  we  do  not  feel  the  love  of  religious 
offices.  We  see  only  the  price  in  the  one  case  and 
only  the  purchase  in  the  other. 

The  only  question  that  remains  is  what  was  the  joy 
of  the  old  Christian  ascetics  of  which  their  asceticism 
was  merely  the  purchasing  price?     The  mere  possi- 
bility of  the  query  is  an  extraordinary  example  of 
[62] 


FRANCIS 

the  way  in  which  we  miss  the  main  points  of  human 
history.  We  are  looking  at  humanity  too  close,  and 
see  only  the  details  and  not  the  vast  and  dominant 
features.  We  look  at  the  rise  of  Christianity,  and 
conceive  it  as  a  rise  of  self-abnegation  and  almost  of 
pessimism.  It  does  not  occur  to  us  that  the  mere 
assertion  that  this  raging  and  confounding  universe 
is  governed  by  justice  and  mercy  is  a  piece  of  stagger- 
ing optimism  fit  to  set  all  men  capering.  The  detail 
over  which  these  monks  went  mad  with  joy  was  the 
universe  itself;  the  only  thing  really  worthy  of  en- 
joyment. The  white  daylight  shone  over  all  the  world, 
the  endless  forests  stood  up  in  their  order.  The 
lightning  awoke  and  the  tree  fell  and  the  sea  gathered 
into  mountains  and  the  ship  went  down,  and  all  these 
disconnected  and  meaningless  and  terrible  objects 
were  all  part  of  one  dark  and  fearful  conspiracy  of 
goodness,  one  merciless  scheme  of  mercy.  That  this 
scheme  of  Nature  was  not  accurate  or  well  founded 
is  perfectly  tenable,  but  surely  it  is  not  tenable  that 
it  was  not  optimistic.  We  insist,  however,  upon  treat- 
[63] 


VARIED    TYPES 

ing  this  matter  tail  foremost.  We  insist  that  the 
ascetics  were  pessimists  because  they  gave  up  three- 
score years  and  ten  for  an  eternity  of  happiness.  We 
forget  that  the  bare  proposition  of  an  eternity  of 
happiness  is  by  its  very  nature  ten  thousand  times 
more  optimistic  than  ten  thousand  pagan  satur- 
nalias. 

Mr.  Adderley's  life  of  Francis  of  Assisi  does  not, 
of  course,  bring  this  out ;  nor  does  it  fully  bring  out 
the  character  of  Francis.  It  has  rather  the  tone  of  a 
devotional  book.  A  devotional  book  is  an  excellent 
thing,  but  we  do  not  look  in  it  for  the  portrait  of  a 
man,  for  the  same  reason  that  we  do  not  look  in  a 
love-sonnet  for  the  portrait  of  a  woman,  because  men 
in  such  conditions  of  mind  not  only  apply  all  virtues 
to  their  idol,  but  all  virtues  in  equal  quantities.  There 
is  no  outline,  because  the  artist  cannot  bear  to  put  in 
a  black  line.  This  blaze  of  benediction,  this  conflict 
between  lights,  has  its  place  in  poetry,  not  in  biog- 
raphy. The  successful  examples  of  it  may  be  found, 
for  instance,  in  the  more  idealistic  odes  of  Spenser. 
[64] 


FRANCIS 

The  design  is  sometimes  almost  indecipherable,  for  the 
poet  draws  in  silver  upon  white. 

It  is  natural,  of  course,  that  Mr.  Adderley  should 
see  Francis  primarily  as  the  founder  of  the  Franciscan 
Order.  We  suspect  this  was  only  one,  perhaps  a 
minor  one,  of  the  things  that  he  was ;  we  suspect  that 
one  of  the  minor  things  that  Christ  did  was  to  found 
Christianity.  But  the  vast  practical  work  of  Francis 
is  assuredly  not  to  be  ignored,  for  this  amazingly  un- 
worldly and  almost  maddeningly  simple-minded  infant 
was  one  of  the  most  consistently  successful  men  that 
ever  fought  with  this  bitter  world.  It  is  the  custom 
to  say  that  the  secret  of  such  men  is  their  profound 
belief  in  themselves,  and  this  is  true,  but  not  all  the 
truth.  Workhouses  and  lunatic  asylums  are  thronged 
with  men  who  believe  in  themselves.  Of  Francis  it 
is  far  truer  to  say  that  the  secret  of  his  success  was 
his  profound  belief  in  other  people,  and  it  is  the  lack 
of  this  that  has  commonly  been  the  curse  of  these  ob- 
scure Napoleons.  Francis  always  assumed  that  every- 
one must  be  just  as  anxious  about  their  common  rela- 
[65] 


VARIED    TYPES 

tive,  the  water-rat,  as  he  was.  He  planned  a  visit  to 
the  Emperor  to  draw  his  attention  to  the  needs  of 
"  his  little  sisters  the  larks."  He  used  to  talk  to  any 
thieves  and  robbers  he  met  about  their  misfortune  in 
being  unable  to  give  rein  to  their  desire  for  holiness. 
It  was  an  innocent  habit,  and  doubtless  the  robbers 
often  "  got  round  him,"  as  the  phrase  goes.  Quite  as 
often,  however,  they  discovered  that  he  had  "  got 
round  "  them,  and  discovered  the  other  side,  the  side 
of  secret  nobility. 

Conceiving  of  St.  Francis  as  primarily  the  founder 
of  the  Franciscan  Order,  Mr.  Adderley  opens  his  nar- 
rative with  an  admirable  sketch  of  the  history  of 
Monasticism  in  Europe,  which  is  certainly  the  best 
thing  in  the  book.  He  distinguishes  clearly  and  fairly 
between  the  Manichaean  ideal  that  underlies  so  much  of 
Eastern  Monasticism  and  the  ideal  of  self -discipline 
which  never  wholly  vanished  from  the  Christian  form. 
But  he  does  not  throw  any  light  on  what  must  be  for 
the  outsider  the  absorbing  problem  of  this  Catho- 
lic asceticism,  for  the  excellent  reason  that,  not 
[66] 


FRANCIS 

being  an  outsider,  he  does  not  find  it  a  problem  at 
all. 

To  most  people,  however,  there  is  a  fascinating  in- 
consistency in  the  position  of  St.  Francis.  He  ex- 
pressed in  loftier  and  bolder  language  than  any 
earthly  thinker  the  conception  that  laughter  is  as 
divine  as  tears.  He  called  his  monks  the  mountebanks 
of  God.  He  never  forgot  to  take  pleasure  in  a  bird 
as  it  flashed  past  him,  or  a  drop  of  water,  as  it  fell 
from  his  finger :  he  was,  perhaps,  the  happiest  of  the 
sons  of  men.  Yet  this  man  undoubtedly  founded  his 
whole  polity  on  the  negation  of  what  we  think  the  most 
imperious  necessities;  in  his  three  vows  of  poverty, 
chastity,  and  obedience,  he  denied  to  himself  and  those 
he  loved  most,  property,  love,  and  liberty.  Why  was 
it  that  the  most  large-hearted  and  poetic  spirits  in  that 
age  found  their  most  congenial  atmosphere  in  these 
awful  renunciations?  Why  did  he  who  loved  where 
all  men  were  blind,  seek  to  blind  himself  where  all  men 
loved?  Why  was  he  a  monk,  and  not  a  troubadour? 
These  questions  are  far  too  large  to  be  answered  fully 
[67] 


VARIED    TYPES 

here,  but  in  any  life  of  Francis  they  ought  at  least 
to  have  been  asked ;  we  have  a  suspicion  that  if  they 
were  answered,  we  should  suddenly  find  that  much  of 
the  enigma  of  this  sullen  time  of  ours  was  answered 
also.  So  it  was  with  the  monks.  The  two  great 
parties  in  human  affairs  are  only  the  party  which  sees 
life  black  against  white,  and  the  party  which  sees  it 
white  against  black,  the  party  which  macerates  and 
blackens  itself  with  sacrifice  because  the  background 
is  full  of  the  blaze  of  an  universal  mercy,  and  the 
party  which  crowns  itself  with  flowers  and  lights  itself 
with  bridal  torches  because  it  stands  against  a  black 
curtain  of  incalculable  night.  The  revellers  are  old, 
and  the  monks  are  young.  It  was  the  monks  who  were 
the  spendthrifts  of  happiness,  and  we  who  are  its 
misers. 

Doubtless,  as  is  apparent  from  Mr.  Adderley's  book, 
the  clear  and  tranquil  life  of  the  Three  Vows  had  a 
fine  and  delicate  effect  on  the  genius  of  Francis.  He 
was  primarily  a  poet.  The  perfection  of  his  literary 
instinct  is  shown  in  his  naming  the  fire  "  brother,"  and 
[68] 


FRANCIS 

the  water  "  sister,"  in  the  quaint  demagogic  dexterity 
of  the  appeal  in  the  sermon  to  the  fishes  "  that  they 
alone  were  saved  in  the  Flood."  In  the  amazingly 
minute  and  graphic  dramatisation  of  the  life,  disap- 
pointments, and  excuses  of  any  shrub  or  beast  that  he 
happened  to  be  addressing,  his  genius  has  a  curious 
resemblance  to  that  of  Burns.  But  if  he  avoided  the 
weakness  of  Burns'  verses  to  animals,  the  occasional 
morbidity,  bombast,  and  moralisation  on  himself,  the 
credit  is  surely  due  to  a  cleaner  and  more  transparent 
life. 

The  general  attitude  of  St.  Francis,  like  that  of 
his  Master,  embodied  a  kind  of  terrible  common  sense. 
The  famous  remark  of  the  Caterpillar  in  "  Alice  in 
Wonderland  " — "  Why  not  ?  "  impresses  us  as  his 
general  motto.  He  could  not  see  why  he  should  not  be 
on  good  terms  with  all  things.  The  pomp  of  war  and 
ambition,  the  great  empire  of  the  Middle  Ages,  and  all 
its  fellows  begin  to  look  tawdry  and  top-heavy,  under 
the  rationality  of  that  innocent  stare.  His  questions 
were  blasting  and  devastating,  like  the  questions  of  a 
[69] 


VARIED    TYPES 

child.  He  would  not  have  been  afraid  even  of  the 
nightmares  of  cosmogony,  for  he  had  no  fear  in  him. 
To  him  the  world  was  small,  not  because  he  had  any 
views  as  to  its  size,  but  for  the  reason  that  gossiping 
ladies  find  it  small,  because  so  many  relatives  were  to 
be  found  in  it.  If  you  had  taken  him  to  the  loneliest 
star  that  the  madness  of  an  astronomer  can  conceive, 
he  would  have  only  beheld  in  it  the  features  of  a  new 
friend. 


[70] 


ROSTAND 


ROSTAND 

WHEN  "  Cyrano  de  Bergerac "  was  pub- 
lished, it  bore  the  subordinate  title  of 
a  heroic  comedy.  We  have  no  tradition 
in  English  literature  which  would  justify  us  in  calling 
a  comedy  heroic,  though  there  was  once  a  poet  who 
called  a  comedy  divine.  By  the  current  modern  con- 
ception, the  hero  has  his  place  in  a  tragedy,  and  the 
one  kind  of  strength  which  is  systematically  denied  to 
him  is  the  strength  to  succeed.  That  the  power  of 
a  man's  spirit  might  possibly  go  to  the  length  of  turn- 
ing a  tragedy  into  a  comedy  is  not  admitted;  never- 
theless, almost  all  the  primitive  legends  of  the  world 
are  comedies,  not  only  in  the  sense  that  they  have  a 
happy  ending,  but  in  the  sense  that  they  are  based 
upon  a  certain  optimistic  assumption  that  the  hero  is 
destined  to  be  the  destroyer  of  the  monster.  Singu- 
larly enough,  this  modern  idea  of  the  essential  disas- 
[73] 


VARIED    TYPES 

troiis  character  of  life,  when  seriously  considered,  con- 
nects itself  with  a  hyper-aesthetic  view  of  tragedy  and 
comedy  which  is  largely  due  to  the  influence  of  modern 
France,  from  which  the  great  heroic  comedies  of  Mon- 
sieur Rostand  have  come.  The  French  genius  has  an 
instinct  for  remedying  its  own  evil  work,  and  France 
gives  always  the  best  cure  for  "  Frenchiness."  The 
idea  of  comedy  which  is  held  in  England  by  the  school 
which  pays  most  attention  to  the  technical  niceties  of 
art  is  a  view  which  renders  such  an  idea  as  that  of 
heroic  comedy  quite  impossible.  The  fundamental 
conception  in  the  minds  of  the  majority  of  our 
younger  writers  is  that  comedy  is,  par  excellence, 
a  fragile  thing.  It  is  conceived  to  be  a  conventional 
world  of  the  most  absolutely  delicate  and  gimcrack 
description.  Such  stories  as  Mr.  Max  Beerbohm's 
"  Happy  Hypocrite  "  are  conceptions  which  would 
vanish  or  fall  into  utter  nonsense  if  viewed  by  one 
single  degree  too  seriously.  But  great  comedy,  the 
comedy  of  Shakespeare  or  Sterne,  not  only  can  be,  but 
must  be,  taken  seriously.  There  is  nothing  to  which  a 
[74] 


ROSTAND 

man  must  give  himself  up  with  more  faith  and  self- 
abandonment  than  to  genuine  laughter.  In  such  com- 
edies one  laughs  with  the  heroes,  and  not  at  them.  The 
humour  which  steeps  the  stories  of  Falstaff  and  Uncle 
Toby  is  a  cosmic  and  philosophic  humour,  a  geniality 
which  goes  down  to  the  depths.  It  is  not  superficial 
reading,  it  is  not  even,  strictly  speaking,  light  read- 
ing. Our  sympathies  are  as  much  committed  to  the 
characters  as  if  they  were  the  predestined  victims  in  a 
Greek  tragedy.  The  modern  writer  of  comedies  may 
be  said  to  boast  of  the  brittleness  of  his  characters. 
He  seems  always  on  the  eve  of  knocking  his  puppets 
to  pieces.  When  John  Oliver  Hobbes  wrote  for  the 
first  time  a  comedy  of  serious  emotions,  she  named  it, 
with  a  thinly-disguised  contempt  for  her  own  work, 
"  A  Sentimental  Comedy."  The  ground  of  this  con- 
ception of  the  artificiality  of  comedy  is  a  profound 
pessimism.  Life  in  the  eyes  of  these  mournful  buf- 
foons is  itself  an  utterly  tragic  thing ;  comedy  must  be 
as  hollow  as  a  grinning  mask.  It  is  a  refuge  from 
the  world,  and  not  even,  properly  speaking,  a  part  of 
[75] 


VARIED    TYPES 

it.     Their  wit  is  a  thin  sheet  of  shining  ice  over  the 
eternal  waters  of  bitterness. 

"  Cyrano  de  Bergerac  "  came  to  us  as  the  new  dec- 
oration of  an  old  truth,  that  merriment  was  one  of  the 
world's  natural  flowers,  and  not  one  of  its  exotics. 
The  gigantesque  levity,  the  flamboyant  eloquence,  the 
Rabelaisian  puns  and  digressions  were  seen  to  be  once 
more  what  they  had  been  in  Rabelais,  the  mere  out- 
bursts of  a  human  sympathy  and  bravado  as  old  and 
solid  as  the  stars.  The  human  spirit  demanded  wit 
as  headlong  and  haughty  as  its  will.  All  was  ex- 
pressed in  the  words  of  Cyrano  at  his  highest  moment 
of  happiness,  II  me  faut  des  geants.  An  essential 
aspect  of  this  question  of  heroic  comedy  is  the  ques- 
tion of  drama  in  rhyme.  There  is  nothing  that 
affords  so  easy  a  point  of  attack  for  the  dramatic 
realist  as  the  conduct  of  a  play  in  verse.  Accord- 
ing to  his  canons,  it  is  indeed  absurd  to  represent 
a  number  of  characters  facing  some  terrible  crisis 
in  their  lives  by  capping  rhymes  like  a  party  play- 
ing bouts  rimes.  In  his  eyes  it  must  appear 
[76] 


ROSTAND 

somewhat  ridiculous  that  two  enemies  taunting  each 
other  with  insupportable  insults  should  obligingly 
provide  each  other  with  metrical  spacing  and  neat  and 
convenient  rhymes.  But  the  whole  of  this  view  rests 
finally  upon  the  fact  that  few  persons,  if  any,  to-day 
understand  what  is  meant  by  a  poetical  play.  It  is  a 
singular  thing  that  those  poetical  plays  which  are 
now  written  in  England  by  the  most  advanced  students 
of  the  drama  follow  exclusively  the  lines  of  Maeter- 
linck, and  use  verse  and  rhyme  for  the  adornment  of 
a  profoundly  tragic  theme.  But  rhyme  has  a  supreme 
appropriateness  for  the  treatment  of  the  higher 
comedy.  The  land  of  heroic  comedy  is,  as  it  were,  a 
paradise  of  lovers,  in  which  it  is  not  difficult  to  imagine 
that  men  could  talk  poetry  all  day  long.  It  is  far 
more  conceivable  that  men's  speech  should  flower 
naturally  into  these  harmonious  forms,  when  they  are 
filled  with  the  essential  spirit  of  youth,  than  when  they 
are  sitting  gloomily  in  the  presence  of  immemorial 
destiny.  The  great  error  consists  in  supposing  that 
poetry  is  an  unnatural  form  of  language.  We  should 
[77] 


VARIED    TYPES 

all  like  to  speak  poetry  at  the  moment  when  we  truly 
live,  and  if  we  do  not  speak,  it  is  because  we  have  an 
impediment  in  our  speech.  It  is  not  song  that  is  the 
narrow  or  artificial  thing,  it  is  conversation  that  is  a 
broken  and  stammering  attempt  at  song.  When  we 
see  men  in  a  spiritual  extravaganza,  like  "  Cyrano  de 
Bergerac,"  speaking  in  rhyme,  it  is  not  our  language 
disguised  or  distorted,  but  our  language  rounded  and 
made  whole.  Rhymes  answer  each  other  as  the  sexes 
in  flowers  and  in  humanity  answer  each  other.  Men 
do  not  speak  so,  it  is  true.  Even  when  they  are  in- 
spired or  in  love  they  talk  inanities.  But  the  poetic 
comedy  does  not  misrepresent  the  speech  one  half  so 
much  as  the  speech  misrepresents  the  soul.  Monsieur 
Rostand  showed  even  more  than  his  usual  insight  when 
he  called  "  Cyrano  de  Bergerac  "  a  comedy,  despite 
the  fact  that,  strictly  speaking,  it  ends  with  disap- 
pointment and  death.  The  essence  of  tragedy  is  a 
spiritual  breakdown  or  decline,  and  in  the  great  French 
play  the  spiritual  sentiment  mounts  unceasingly  until 
the  last  line.  It  is  not  the  facts  themselves,  but  our 
[78] 


ROSTAND 

feeling  about  them,  that  makes  tragedy  and  comedy, 
and  death  is  more  joyful  in  Rostand  than  life  in 
Maeterlinck.  The  same  apparent  contradiction  holds 
good  in  the  case  of  the  drama  of  "  L'Aiglon,"  now 
being  performed  with  so  much  success.  Although  the 
hero  is  a  weakling,  the  subject  a  fiasco,  the  end  a  pre- 
mature death  and  a  personal  disillusionment,  yet,  in 
spite  of  this  theme,  which  might  have  been  chosen  for 
its  depressing  qualities,  the  unconquerable  paean  of  the 
praise  of  things,  the  ungovernable  gaiety  of  the  poet's 
song  swells  so  high  that  at  the  end  it  seems  to  drown 
all  the  weak  voices  of  the  characters  in  one  crashing 
chorus  of  great  things  and  great  men.  A  multi- 
tude of  mottoes  might  be  taken  from  the  play  to  in- 
dicate and  illustrate,  not  only  its  own  spirit,  but 
much  of  the  spirit  of  modern  life.  When  in  the 
vision  of  the  field  of  Wagram  the  horrible  voices 
of  the  wounded  cry  out,  Les  corbeaux,  les  cor- 
beaux,  the  Duke,  overwhelmed  with  a  nightmare  of 
hideous  trivialities,  cries  out,  Oii,  oti,  sont  les  aigles? 
That  antithesis  might  stand  alone  as  an  invocation 
[79] 


VARIED    TYPES 

at  the  beginning  of  the  twentieth  century  to  the  spirit 
of  heroic  comedy.  When  an  ex-General  of  Napoleon 
is  asked  his  reason  for  having  betrayed  the  Emperor, 
he  replies,  La  fatigue,  and  at  that  a  veteran  private 
of  the  Great  Army  rushes  forward,  and  crying  pas- 
sionately, Et  nous?  pours  out  a  terrible  description  of 
the  life  lived  by  the  commoner  soldier.  To-day,  when 
pessimism  is  almost  as  much  a  symbol  of  wealth  and 
fashion  as  jewels  or  cigars,  when  the  pampered  heirs 
of  the  ages  can  sum  up  life  in  few  other  words  but 
la  fatigue,  there  might  surely  come  a  cry  from  the  vast 
mass  of  common  humanity  from  the  beginning — et 
nous?  It  is  this  potentiality  for  enthusiasm  among 
the  mass  of  men  that  makes  the  function  of  comedy 
at  once  common  and  sublime.  Shakespeare's  "  Much 
Ado  About  Nothing  "  is  a  great  comedy,  because  be- 
hind it  is  the  whole  pressure  of  that  love  of  love  which 
is  the  youth  of  the  world,  which  is  common  to  all  the 
young,  especially  to  those  who  swear  they  will  die 
bachelors  and  old  maids.  "  Love's  Labour's  Lost "  is 
filled  with  the  same  energy,  and  there  it  falls  even  more 
[80] 


ROSTAND 

definitely  into  the  scope  of  our  subject,  since  it  is  a 
comedy  in  rhyme  in  which  all  men  speak  lyrically  as 
naturally  as  the  birds  sing  in  pairing  time.  What  the 
love  of  love  is  to  the  Shakespearean  comedies,  that 
other  and  more  mysterious  human  passion,  the  love  of 
death,  is  to  "  L'Aiglon."  Whether  we  shall  ever  have 
in  England  a  new  tradition  of  poetic  comedy  it  is 
difficult  at  present  to  say,  but  we  shall  assuredly  never 
have  it  until  we  realise  that  comedy  is  built  upon  ever- 
lasting foundations  in  the  nature  of  things,  that  it  is 
not  a  thing  too  light  to  capture,  but  too  deep  to  plumb. 
Monsieur  Rostand,  in  his  description  of  the  Battle  of 
Wagram,  does  not  shrink  from  bringing  about  the 
Duke's  ears  the  frightful  voices  of  actual  battle,  of 
men  torn  by  crows,  and  suffocated  with  blood,  but 
when  the  Duke,  terrified  at  these  dreadful  appeals, 
asks  them  for  their  final  word,  they  all  cry  together 
Vive  I'Empereur!  Monsieur  Rostand,  perhaps,  did 
not  know  that  he  was  writing  an  allegory.  To  me 
that  field  of  Wagram  is  the  field  of  the  modern  war 
of  literature.  We  hear  nothing  but  the  voices  of 
[81] 


VARIED    TYPES 

pain;  the  whole  is  one  phonograph  of  horror.  It  is 
right  that  we  should  hear  these  things,  it  is  right  that 
not  one  of  them  should  be  silenced ;  but  these  cries  of 
distress  are  not  in  life,  as  they  are  in  modern  art,  the 
only  voices;  they  are  the  voices  of  men,  but  not  the 
voice  of  man.  When  questioned  finally  and  seriously 
as  to  their  conception  of  their  destiny,  men  have  from 
the  beginning  of  time  answered  in  a  thousand  philos- 
ophies and  religions  with  a  single  voice  and  in  a  sense 
most  sacred  and  tremendous,  Vive  VEmpereur. 


[83] 


CHARLES 


CHARLES  II 


JP""  "*^  HERE  are  a  great  many  bonds  which  still 
connect  us  with  Charles  II.,  one  of  the 
idlest  men  of  one  of  the  idlest  epochs. 
Among  other  things  Charles  II.  represented  one  thing 
which  is  very  rare  and  very  satisfying;  he  was  a  real 
and  consistent  sceptic.  Scepticism,  both  in  its  ad- 
vantages and  disadvantages,  is  greatly  misunderstood 
in  our  time.  There  is  a  curious  idea  abroad  that  scep- 
ticism has  some  connection  with  such  theories  as  ma- 
terialism and  atheism  and  secularism.  This  is  of 
course  a  mistake;  the  true  sceptic  has  nothing  to  do 
with  these  theories  simply  because  they  are  theories. 
The  true  sceptic  is  as  much  a  spiritualist  as  he  is  a 
materialist.  He  thinks  that  the  savage  dancing 
round  an  African  idol  stands  quite  as  good  a  chance 
of  being  right  as  Darwin.  He  thinks  that  mysticism 
[85] 


VARIED    TYPES 

is  every  bit  as  rational  as  rationalism.  He  has  indeed 
the  most  profound  doubts  as  to  whether  St.  Matthew 
wrote  his  own  gospel.  But  he  has  quite  equally  pro- 
found doubts  as  to  whether  the  tree  he  is  looking  at 
is  a  tree  and  not  a  rhinoceros. 

This  is  the  real  meaning  of  that  mystery  which  ap- 
pears so  prominently  in  the  lives  of  great  sceptics, 
which  appears  with  especial  prominence  in  the  life  of 
Charles  II.  I  mean  their  constant  oscillation  between 
atheism  and  Roman  Catholicism.  Roman  Catholicism 
is  indeed  a  great  and  fixed  and  formidable  system,  but 
so  is  atheism.  Atheism  is  indeed  the  most  daring  of 
all  dogmas,  more  daring  than  the  vision  of  a  palpable 
day  of  judgment.  For  it  is  the  assertion  of  a  uni- 
versal negative ;  for  a  man  to  say  that  there  is  no  God 
in  the  universe  is  like  saying  that  there  are  no  insects 
in  any  of  the  stars. 

Thus  it  was  with  that  wholesome  and  systematic 

sceptic,  Charles  II.     When  he  took  the  Sacrament 

according  to  the  forms  of  the  Roman  Church  in  his 

last  hour  he  was  acting  consistently  as  a  philosopher. 

[86] 


CHARLES    II 

The  wafer  might  not  be  God ;  similarly  it  might  not 
be  a  wafer.  To  the  genuine  and  poetical  sceptic  the 
whole  world  is  incredible,  with  its  bulbous  mountains 
and  its  fantastic  trees.  The  whole  order  of  things 
is  as  outrageous  as  any  miracle  which  could  presume 
to  violate  it.  Transubstantiation  might  be  a  dream, 
but  if  it  was,  it  was  assuredly  a  dream  within  a  dream. 
Charles  II.  sought  to  guard  himself  against  hell  fire 
because  he  could  not  think  hell  itself  more  fantastic 
than  the  world  as  it  was  revealed  by  science.  The 
priest  crept  up  the  staircase,  the  doors  'were  closed, 
the  few  of  the  faithful  who  were  present  hushed  them- 
selves respectfully,  and  so,  with  every  circumstance  of 
secrecy  and  sanctity,  with  the  cross  uplifted  and  the 
prayers  poured  out,  was  consummated  the  last  great 
act  of  logical  unbelief. 

The  problem  of  Charles  II.  consists  in  this,  that 
he  has  scarcely  a  moral  virtue  to  his  name,  and  yet 
he  attracts  us  morally.  We  feel  that  some  of  the 
virtues  have  been  dropped  out  in  the  lists  made  by  all 
the  saints  and  sages,  and  that  Charles  II.  was  pre- 
[87] 


VARIED    TYPES 

eminently  successful  in  these  wild  and  unmentionable 
virtues.  The  real  truth  of  this  matter  and  the  real 
relation  of  Charles  II.  to  the  moral  ideal  is  worth  some- 
what more  exhaustive  study. 

It  is  a  commonplace  that  the  Restoration  movement 
can  only  be  understood  when  considered  as  a  reaction 
against  Puritanism.  But  it  is  insufficiently  realised 
that  the  tyranny  which  half  frustrated  all  the  good 
work  of  Puritanism  was  of  a  very  peculiar  kind.  It 
was  not  the  fire  of  Puritanism,  the  exultation  in  so- 
briety, the  frenzy  of  a  restraint,  which  passed  away ; 
that  still  burns  in  the  heart  of  England,  only  to  be 
quenched  by  the  final  overwhelming  sea.  But  it  is 
seldom  remembered  that  the  Puritans  were  in  their  day 
emphatically  intellectual  bullies,  that  they  relied  swag- 
geringly  on  the  logical  necessity  of  Calvinism,  that 
they  bound  omnipotence  itself  in  the  chains  of  syl- 
logism. The  Puritans  fell,  through  the  damning  fact 
that  they  had  a  complete  theory  of  life,  through  the 
eternal  paradox  that  a  satisfactory  explanation  can 
never  satisfy.  Like  Brutus  and  the  logical  Romans, 
[88] 


CHARLES    II 

like  the  logical  French  Jacobins,  like  the  logical  Eng- 
lish utilitarians,  they  taught  the  lesson  that  men's 
wants  have  always  been  right  and  their  arguments 
always  wrong.  Reason  is  always  a  kind  of  brute 
force;  those  who  appeal  to  the  head  rather  than  the 
heart,  however  pallid  and  polite,  are  necessarily  men 
of  violence.  We  speak  of  "  touching  "  a  man's  heart, 
but  we  can  do  nothing  to  his  head  but  hit  it.  The 
tyranny  of  the  Puritans  over  the  bodies  of  men  was 
comparatively  a  trifle;  pikes,  bullets,  and  conflagra- 
tions are  comparatively  a  trifle.  Their  real  tyranny 
was  the  tyranny  of  aggressive  reason  over  the  cowed 
and  demoralised  human  spirit.  Their  brooding  and 
raving  can  be  forgiven,  can  in  truth  be  loved  and 
reverenced,  for  it  is  humanity  on  fire;  hatred  can  be 
genial,  madness  can  be  homely.  The  Puritans  fell, 
not  because  they  were  fanatics,  but  because  they  were 
rationalists. 

When  we  consider  these  things,  when  we  remember 
that  Puritanism,  which  means  in  our  day  a  moral  and 
almost  temperamental  attitude,  meant  in  that  day  a 
[89] 


VARIED    TYPES 

singularly  arrogant  logical  attitude,  we  shall  com- 
prehend a  little  more  the  grain  of  good  that  lay  in 
the  vulgarity  and  triviality  of  the  Restoration.  The 
Restoration,  of  which  Charles  II.  was  a  pre-eminent 
type,  was  in  part  a  revolt  of  all  the  chaotic  and  un- 
classed  parts  of  human  nature,  the  parts  that  are  left 
over,  and  will  always  be  left  over,  by  every  rational- 
istic system  of  life.  This  does  not  merely  account  for 
the  revolt  of  the  vices  and  of  that  empty  recklessness 
and  horseplay  which  is  sometimes  more  irritating  than 
any  vice.  It  accounts  also  for  the  return  of  the  virtue 
of  politeness,  for  that  also  is  a  nameless  thing  ignored 
by  logical  codes.  Politeness  has  indeed  about  it  some- 
thing mystical;  like  religion,  it  is  everywhere  under- 
stood and  nowhere  defined.  Charles  is  not  entirely  to 
be  despised  because,  as  the  type  of  this  movement, 
he  let  himself  float  upon  this  new  tide  of  politeness. 
There  was  some  moral  and  social  value  in  his  perfec- 
tion in  little  things.  He  could  not  keep  the  Ten 
Commandments,  but  he  kept  the  ten  thousand  com- 
mandments. His  name  is  unconnected  with  any  great 
[90] 


CHARLES    II 

acts  of  duty  or  sacrifice,  but  it  is  connected  with  a 
great  many  of  those  acts  of  magnanimous  politeness, 
of  a  kind  of  dramatic  delicacy,  which  lie  on  the  dim 
borderland  between  morality  and  art.  "  Charles  II.," 
said  Thackeray,  with  unerring  brevity,  "  was  a  ras- 
cal, but  not  a  snob."  Unlike  George  IV.  he  was  a  gen- 
tleman, and  a  gentleman  is  a  man  who  obeys  strange 
statutes,  not  to  be  found  in  any  moral  text-book,  and 
practises  strange  virtues  nameless  from  the  begin- 
ning of  the  world. 

So  much  may  be  said  and  should  be  said  for  the 
Restoration,  that  it  was  the  revolt  of  something  hu- 
man, if  only  the  debris  of  human  nature.  But  more 
cannot  be  said.  It  was  emphatically  a  fall  and  not 
an  ascent,  a  recoil  and  not  an  advance,  a  sudden  weak- 
ness and  not  a  sudden  strength.  That  the  bow  .of 
human  nature  was  by  Puritanism  bent  immeasurably 
too  far,  that  it  overstrained  the  soul  by  stretching 
it  to  the  height  of  an  almost  horrible  idealism,  makes 
the  collapse  of  the  Restoration  infinitely  more  ex- 
cusable, but  it  does  not  make  it  any  the  less  a  collapse. 
[91] 


VARIED    TYPES 

Nothing  can  efface  the  essential  distinction  that  Puri- 
tanism was  one  of  the  world's  great  efforts  after  the 
discovery  of  the  true  order,  whereas  it  was  the 
essence  of  the  Restoration  that  it  involved  no  effort  at 
all.  It  is  true  that  the  Restoration  was  not,  as  has 
been  widely  assumed,  the  most  immoral  epoch  of  our 
history.  Its  vices  cannot  compare  for  a  moment  in 
this  respect  with  the  monstrous  tragedies  and  almost 
suffocating  secrecies  and  villainies  of  the  Court  of 
James  I.  But  the  dram-drinking  and  nose-slitting 
of  the  saturnalia  of  Charles  II.  seem  at  once  more 
human  and  more  detestable  than  the  passions  and 
poisons  of  the  Renaissance,  much  in  the  same  way  that 
a  monkey  appears  inevitably  more  human  and  more 
detestable  than  a  tiger.  Compared  with  the  Renais- 
sance, there  is  something  Cockney  about  the  Restora- 
tion. Not  only  was  it  too  indolent  for  great  morality, 
it  was  too  indolent  even  for  great  art.  It  lacked  that 
seriousness  which  is  needed  even  for  the  pursuit  of 
pleasure,  that  discipline  which  is  essential  even  to  a 
game  of  lawn  tennis.  It  would  have  appeared  to 
[92] 


CHARLES    II 

Charles  II.'s  poets  quite  as  arduous  to  write  "  Para- 
dise Lost  "  as  to  regain  Paradise. 

All  old  and  vigorous  languages  abound  in  images 
and  metaphors,  which,  though  lightly  and  casually 
used,  are  in  truth  poems  in  themselves,  and  poems  of 
a  high  and  striking  order.  Perhaps  no  phrase  is  so 
terribly  significant  as  the  phrase  "  killing  time."  It 
is  a  tremendous  and  poetical  image,  the  image  of  a 
kind  of  cosmic  parricide.  There  are  on  the  earth  a 
race  of  revellers  who  do,  under  all  their  exuberance, 
fundamentally  regard  time  as  an  enemy.  Of  these 
were  Charles  II.  and  the  men  of  the  Restoration. 
Whatever  may  have  been  their  merits,  and  as  we  have 
said  we  think  that  they  had  merits,  they  can  never 
have  a  place  among  the  great  representatives  of  the 
joy  of  life,  for  they  belonged  to  those  lower  epi- 
cureans who  kill  time,  as  opposed  to  those  higher  epi- 
cureans who  make  time  live. 

Of  a  people  in  this  temper  Charles  II.  was  the 
natural  and  rightful  head.  He  may  have  been  a 
pantomime  King,  but  he  was  a  King,  and  with  all  his 
[93] 


VARIED    TYPES 

geniality  he  let  nobody  forget  it.  He  was  not,  in- 
deed, the  aimless  flaneur  that  he  has  been  repre- 
sented. He  was  a  patient  and  cunning  politician, 
who  disguised  his  wisdom  under  so  perfect  a  mask  of 
folly  that  he  not  only  deceived  his  allies  and  oppo- 
nents, but  has  deceived  almost  all  the  historians  that 
have  come  after  him.  But  if  Charles  was,  as  he  em- 
phatically was,  the  only  Stuart  who  really  achieved 
despotism,  it  was  greatly  due  to  the  temper  of  the 
nation  and  the  age.  Despotism  is  the  easiest  of  all 
governments,  at  any  rate  for  che  governed. 

It  is  indeed  a  form  of  slavery,  and  it  is  the  despot 
who  is  the  slave.  Men  in  a  state  of  decadence  em- 
ploy professionals  to  fight  for  them,  professionals  to 
dance  for  them,  and  a  professional  to  rule  them. 

Almost  all  the  faces  in  the  portraits  of  that  time 
look,  as  it  were,  like  masks  put  on  artificially  with  the 
perruque.  A  strange  unreality  broods  over  the  period. 
Distracted  as  we  are  with  civic  mysteries  and  prob- 
lems we  can  afford  to  rejoice.  Our  tears  are  less 
desolate  than  their  laughter,  our  restraints  are  larger 
than  their  liberty. 

[94] 


STEVENSON 


STEVENSON  * 

A  RECENT  incident  has  finally  convinced 
us  that  Stevenson  was,  as  we  suspected,  a 
great  man.  We  knew  from  recent  books 
that  we  have  noticed,  from  the  scorn  of  "  Ephemera 
Critica  "  and  Mr.  George  Moore,  that  Stevenson  had 
the  first  essential  qualification  of  a  great  man:  that 
of  being  misunderstood  by  his  opponents.  But  from 
the  book  which  Messrs.  Chatto  &  Windus  have  issued, 
in  the  same  binding  as  Stevenson's  works,  "  Rpbert 
Louis  Stevenson,"  by  Mr.  H.  Bellyse  Baildon,  we 
learn  that  he  has  the  other  essential  qualification,  that 
of  being  misunderstood  by  his  admirers.  Mr.  Baildon 
has  many  interesting  things  to  tell  us  about  Stevenson 
himself,  whom  he  knew  at  college.  Nor  are  his  criti- 
cisms by  any  means  valueless.  That  upon  the  plays, 

*  "  Robert  Louis  Stevenson:  A  Life  Study  in  Criticism."    By 
H.  Bellyse  Baildon.     Chatto  &  Windus. 

[97] 


VARIED    TYPES 

especially  "  Beau  Austin,"  is  remarkably  thoughtful 
and  true.  But  it  is  a  very  singular  fact,  and  goes 
far,  as  we  say,  to  prove  that  Stevenson  had  that  un- 
fathomable quality  which  belongs  to  the  great,  that 
this  admiring  student  of  Stevenson  can  number  and 
marshal  all  the  master's  work  and  distribute  praise 
and  blame  with  decision  and  even  severity,  without 
ever  thinking  for  a  moment  of  the  principles  of  art 
and  ethics  which  would  have  struck  us  as  the  very 
things  that  Stevenson  nearly  killed  himself  to  ex- 
press. 

Mr.  Baildon,  for  example,  is  perpetually  lecturing 
Stevenson  for  his  "  pessimism  " ;  surely  a  strange 
charge  against  a  man  who  has  done  more  than  any 
modern  artist  to  make  men  ashamed  of  their  shame 
of  life.  But  he  complains  that,  in  "  The  Master  of 
Ballantrae"  and  "Dr.  Jekyll  and  Mr.  Hyde," 
Stevenson  gives  evil  a  final  victory  over  good.  Now 
if  there  was  one  point  that  Stevenson  more  constantly 
and  passionately  emphasised  than  any  other  it  was 
that  we  must  worship  good  for  its  own  value  and 
[98] 


STEVENSON 

beauty,  without  any  reference  whatever  to  victory  or 
failure  in  space  and  time.  "  Whatever  we  are  in- 
tended to  do,"  he  said,  "  we  are  not  intended  to  suc- 
ceed." That  the  stars  in  their  courses  fight  against 
virtue,  that  humanity  is  in  its  nature  a  forlorn  hope, 
this  was  the  very  spirit  that  through  the  whole  of 
Stevenson's  work  sounded  a  trumpet  to  all  the 
brave.  The  story  of  Henry  Durie  is  dark  enough,  but 
could  anyone  stand  beside  the  grave  of  that  sodden 
monomaniac  and  not  respect  him?  It  is  strange  that 
men  should  see  sublime  inspiration  in  the  ruins  of  an 
old  church  and  see  none  in  the  ruins  of  a  man. 

The  author  has  most  extraordinary  ideas  about 
Stevenson's  tales  of  blood  and  spoil;  he  appears  to 
think  that  they  prove  Stevenson  to  have  had  (we 
use  Mr.  Baildon's  own  phrase)  a  kind  of  "  homicidal 
mania."  "  He  [Stevenson]  arrives  pretty  much  at 
the  paradox  that  one  can  hardly  be  better  employed 
than  in  taking  life."  Mr.  Baildon  might  as  well  say 
that  Dr.  Conan  Doyle  delights  in  committing  inex- 
plicable crimes,  that  Mr.  Clark  Russell  is  a  notorious 
[99] 


VARIED    TYPES 

pirate,  and  that  Mr.  Wilkie  Collins  thought  that  one 
could  hardly  be  better  employed  than  in  stealing 
moonstones  and  falsifying  marriage  registers.  But 
Mr.  Baildon  is  scarcely  alone  in  this  error :  few  people 
have  understood  properly  the  goriness  of  Stevenson. 
Stevenson  was  essentially  the  robust  schoolboy  who 
draws  skeletons  and  gibbets  in  his  Latin  grammar.  It 
was  not  that  he  took  pleasure  in  death,  but  that  he 
took  pleasure  in  life,  in  every  muscular  and  emphatic 
action  of  life,  even  if  it  were  an  action  that  took  the 
life  of  another. 

Let  us  suppose  that  one  gentleman  throws  a  knife 
at  another  gentleman  and  pins  him  to  the  wall.  It 
is  scarcely  necessary  to  remark  that  there  are  in  this 
transaction  two  somewhat  varying  personal  points  of 
view.  The  point  of  view  of  the  man  pinned  is  the 
tragic  and  moral  point  of  view,  and  this  Stevenson 
showed  clearly  that  he  understood  in  such  stories  as 
"  The  Master  of  Ballantrae  "  and  "  Weir  of  Her- 
miston."  But  there  is  another  view  of  the  matter — 
that  in  which  the  whole  act  is  an  abrupt  and  brilliant 
[100] 


STEVENSON 

explosion  of  bodily  vitality,  like  breaking  a  rock  with 
a  blow  of  a  hammer,  or  just  clearing  a  five-barred 
gate.  This  is  the  standpoint  of  romance,  and  it  is 
the  soul  of  "  Treasure  Island  "  and  "  The  Wrecker." 
It  was  not,  indeed,  that  Stevenson  loved  men  less,  but 
that  he  loved  clubs  and  pistols  more.  He  had,  in 
truth,  in  the  devouring  universalism  of  his  soul,  a 
positive  love  for  inanimate  objects  such  as  has  not 
been  known  since  St.  Francis  called  the  sun  brother 
and  the  well  sister.  We  feel  that  he  was  actually  in 
love  with  the  wooden  crutch  that  Silver  sent  hurtling 
in  the  sunlight,  with  the  box  that  Billy  Bones  left  at 
the  "  Admiral  Benbow,"  with  the  knife  that  Wicks 
drove  through  his  own  hand  and  the  table.  There  is 
always  in  his  work  a  certain  clean-cut  angularity 
which  makes  us  remember  that  he  was  fond  of  cutting 
wood  with  an  axe. 

Stevenson's  new  biographer,  however,  cannot  make 

any  allowance  for  this  deep-rooted  poetry  of  mere 

sight  and  touch.     He  is  always  imputing  something 

to  Stevenson  as  a  crime  which  Stevenson  really  pro- 

[101] 


VARIED    TYPES 

fessed  as  an  object.  He  says  of  that  glorious  riot  of 
horror,  "  The  Destroying  Angel,"  in  "  The  Dyna- 
miter," that  it  is  "  highly  fantastic  and  putting  a 
strain  on  our  credulity."  This  is  rather  like  describ- 
ing the  travels  of  Baron  Munchausen  as  "  uncon- 
vincing." The  whole  story  of  "  The  Dynamiter  "  is 
a  kind  of  humorous  nightmare,  and  even  in  that  story 
"  The  Destroying  Angel  "  is  supposed  to  be  an  ex- 
travagant lie  made  up  on  the  spur  of  the  moment.  It 
is  a  dream  within  a  dream,  and  to  accuse  it  of  im- 
probability is  like  accusing  the  sky  of  being  blue. 
But  Mr.  Baildon,  whether  from  hasty  reading  or  na- 
tural difference  of  taste,  cannot  in  the  least  compre- 
hend that  rich  and  romantic  irony  of  Stevenson's 
London  stories.  He  actually  says  of  that  portentous 
monument  of  humour,  Prince  Florizel  of  Bohemia, 
that,  "  though  evidently  admired  by  his  creator,  he  is 
to  me  on  the  whole  rather  an  irritating  presence." 
From  this  we  are  almost  driven  to  believe  (though 
desperately  and  against  our  will)  that  Mr.  Baildon 
thinks  that  Prince  Florizel  is  to  be  taken  seriously, 
[102] 


STEVENSON 

as  if  he  were  a  man  in  real  life.  For  ourselves,  Prince 
Florizel  is  almost  our  favourite  character  in  fiction; 
but  we  willingly  add  the  proviso  that  if  we  met  him 
in  real  life  we  should  kill  him. 

The  fact  is,  that  the  whole  mass  of  Stevenson's 
spiritual  and  intellectual  virtues  have  been  partly 
frustrated  by  one  additional  virtue — that  of  artistic 
dexterity.  If  he  had  chalked  up  his  great  message  on 
a  wall,  like  Walt  Whitman,  in  large  and  straggling 
letters,  it  would  have  startled  men  like  a  blasphemy. 
But  he  wrote  his  light-headed  paradoxes  in  so  flowing 
a  copy-book  hand  that  everyone  supposed  they  must 
be  copy-book  sentiments.  He  suffered  from  his  versa- 
tility, not,  as  is  loosely  said,  by  not  doing  every  de- 
partment well  enough,  but  by  doing  every  department 
too  well.  As  child,  cockney,  pirate,  or  Puritan,  his 
disguises  were  so  good  that  most  people  could  not  see 
the  same  man  under  all.  It  is  an  unjust  fact  that  if 
a  man  can  play  the  fiddle,  give  legal  opinions,  and 
black  boots  just  tolerably,  he  is  called  an  Admirable 
Crichton,  but  if  he  does  all  three  thoroughly  well,  he 
[103] 


VARIED    TYPES 

is  apt  to  be  regarded,  in  the  several  departments,  as 
a  common  fiddler,  a  common  lawyer,  and  a  common 
boot-black.  This  is  what  has  happened  in  the  case  of 
Stevenson.  If  "  Dr.  Jekyll,"  "  The  Master  of  Bal- 
lantrae,"  "The  Child's  Garden  of  Verses,"  and 
"  Across  the  Plains  "  had  been  each  of  them  one  shade 
less  perfectly  done  than  they  were,  everyone  would 
have  seen  that  they  were  all  parts  of  the  same  message ; 
but  by  succeeding  in  the  proverbial  miracle  of  being 
in  five  places  at  once,  he  has  naturally  convinced 
others  that  he  was  five  different  people.  But  the  real 
message  of  Stevenson  was  as  simple  as  that  of  Mo- 
hamet, as  moral  as  that  of  Dante,  as  confident  as  that 
of  Whitman,  and  as  practical  as  that  of  James  Watt. 
The  conception  which  unites  the  whole  varied  work 
of  Stevenson  was  that  romance,  or  the  vision  of  the 
possibilities  of  things,  was  far  more  important  than 
mere  occurrences:  that  one  was  the  soul  of  our  life, 
the  other  the  body,  and  that  the  soul  was  the  precious 
thing.  The  germ  of  all  his  stories  lies  in  the  idea 
that  every  landscape  or  scrap  of  scenery  has  a  soul: 
[104] 


STEVENSON 

and  that  soul  is  a  story.  Standing  before  a  stunted 
orchard  with  a  broken  stone  wall,  we  may  know  as  a 
mere  fact  that  no  one  has  been  through  it  but  an 
elderly  female  cook.  But  everything  exists  in  the 
human  soul:  that  orchard  grows  in  our  own  brain, 
and  there  it  is  the  shrine  and  theatre  of  some  strange 
chance  between  a  girl  and  a  ragged  poet  and  a  mad 
farmer.  Stevenson  stands  for  the  conception  that 
ideas  are  the  real  incidents:  that  our  fancies  are  our 
adventures.  To  think  of  a  cow  with  wings  is  essen- 
tially to  have  met  one.  And  this  is  the  reason  for  his 
wide  diversities  of  narrative :  he  had  to  make  one  story 
as  rich  as  a  ruby  sunset,  another  as  grey  as  a  hoary 
monolith:  for  the  story  was  the  soul,  or  rather  the 
meaning,  of  the  bodily  vision.  It  is  quite  inappropri- 
ate to  judge  "  The  Teller  of  Tales  "  (as  the  Samoans 
called  him)  by  the  particular  novels  he  wrote,  as  one 
would  judge  Mr.  George  Moore  by  "  Esther  Waters." 
These  novels  were  only  the  two  or  three  of  his  soul's 
adventures  that  he  happened  to  tell.  But  he  died 
with  a  thousand  stories  in  his  heart. 
[105] 


THOMAS  CARLYLE 


THOMAS  CARLYLE 


Y  ""^HERE  are  two  main  moral  necessities  for 

the  work  of  a  great  man :  the  first  is  that 
he  should  believe  in  the  truth  of  his  mes- 
sage; the  second  is  that  he  should  believe  in  the  ac- 
ceptability of  his  message.     It  was  the  whole  tragedy 
of  Carlyle  that  he  had  the  first  and  not  the  second. 

The  ordinary  capital,  however,  which  is  made  out 
of  Carlyle's  alleged  gloom  is  a  very  paltry  matter. 
Carlyle  had  his  faults,  both  as  a  man  and  as  a  writer, 
but  the  attempt  to  explain  his  gospel  in  terms  of  his 
"  liver  "  is  merely  pitiful.  If  indigestion  invariably 
resulted  in  a  "  Sartor  Resartus,"  it  would  be  a  vastly 
more  tolerable  thing  than  it  is.  Diseases  do  not  turn 
into  poems;  even  the  decadent  really  writes  with  the 
healthy  part  of  his  organism.  If  Carlyle's  private 
faults  and  literary  virtues  ran  somewhat  in  the  same 
[109] 


VARIED    TYPES 

line,  he  is  only  in  the  situation  of  every  man;  for 
every  one  of  us  it  is  surely  very  difficult  to  say  pre- 
cisely where  our  honest  opinions  end  and  our  personal 
predilections  begin.  But  to  attempt  to  denounce 
Carlyle  as  a  mere  savage  egotist  cannot  arise  from 
anything  but  a  pure  inability  to  grasp  Carlyle's  gos- 
pel. "  Ruskin,"  says  a  critic,  "  did,  all  the  same, 
verily  believe  in  God;  Carlyle  believed  only  in  him- 
self." This  is  certainly  a  distinction  between  the 
author  he  has  understood  and  the  author  he  has  not 
understood.  Carlyle  believed  in  himself,  but  he  could 
not  have  believed  in  himself  more  than  Ruskin  did; 
they  both  believed  in  God,  because  they  felt  that  if 
everything  else  fell  into  wrack  and  ruin,  themselves 
were  permanent  witnesses  to  God.  Where  they  both 
failed  was  not  in  belief  in  God  or  in  belief  in  them- 
selves; they  failed  in  belief  in  other  people.  It  is 
not  enough  for  a  prophet  to  believe  in  his  message; 
he  must  believe  in  its  acceptability.  Christ,  St. 
Francis,  Bunyan,  Wesley,  Mr.  Gladstone,  Walt  Whit- 
man, men  of  indescribable  variety,  were  all  alike  in 
[110] 


THOMAS    CARLYLE 

a  certain  faculty  of  treating  the  average  man  as  their 
equal,  of  trusting  to  his  reason  and  good  feeling 
without  fear  and  without  condescension.  It  was  this 
simplicity  of  confidence,  not  only  in  God,  but  in  the 
image  of  God,  that  was  lacking  in  Carlyle. 

But  the  attempts  to  discredit  Carlyle's  religious 
sentiment  must  absolutely  fall  to  the  ground.  The 
profound  security  of  Carlyle's  sense  of  the  unity  of 
the  Cosmos  is  like  that  of  a  Hebrew  prophet ;  and  it 
has  the  same  expression  that  it  had  in  the  Hebrew 
prophets — humour.  A  man  must  be  very  full  of 
faith  to  jest  about  his  divinity.  No  Neo-Pagan 
delicately  suggesting  a  revival  of  Dionysus,  no 
vague,  half-converted  Theosophist  groping  towards 
a  recognition  of  Buddha,  would  ever  think  of  crack- 
ing jokes  on  the  matter.  But  to  the  Hebrew  prophets 
their  religion  was  so  solid  a  thing,  like  a  mountain 
or  a  mammoth,  that  the  irony  of  its  contact  with 
trivial  and  fleeting  matters  struck  them  like  a  blow. 
So  it  was  with  Carlyle.  His  supreme  contribution, 
both  to  philosophy  and  literature,  was  his  sense  of 
[111] 


VARIED    TYPES 

the  sarcasm  of  eternity.  Other  writers  had  seen  the 
hope  or  the  terror  of  the  heavens,  he  alone  saw  the 
humour  of  them.  Other  writers  had  seen  that  there 
could  be  something  elemental  and  eternal  in  a  song 
or  statute,  he  alone  saw  that  there  could  be  some- 
thing elemental  and  eternal  in  a  joke.  No  one  who 
ever  read  it  will  forget  the  passage,  full  of  dark  and 
agnostic  gratification,  in  which  he  narrates  that  some 
Court  chronicler  described  Louis  XV.  as  "  falling 
asleep  in  the  Lord."  "  Enough  for  us  that  he  did 
fall  asleep ;  that,  curtained  in  thick  night,  under  what 
keeping  we  ask  not,  he  at  least  will  never,  through 
unending  ages,  insult  the  face  of  the  sun  any  more 
.  .  .  and  we  go  on,  if  not  to  better  forms  of  beast- 
liness, at  least  to  fresher  ones." 

The  supreme  value  of  Carlyle  to  English  literature 
was  that  he  was  the  founder  of  modern  irrationalism ; 
a  movement  fully  as  important  as  modern  rationalism. 
A  great  deal  is  said  in  these  days  about  the  value  or 
valuelessness  of  logic.  In  the  main,  indeed,  logic  is 
not  a  productive  tool  so  much  as  a  weapon  of  defence. 


THOMAS    CARLYLE 

A  man  building  up  an  intellectual  system  has  to  build 
like  Nehemiah,  with  the  sword  in  one  hand  and  the 
trowel  in  the  other.  The  imagination,  the  construc- 
tive quality,  is  the  trowel,  and  argument  is  the  sword. 
A  wide  experience  of  actual  intellectual  affairs  will 
lead  most  people  to  the  conclusion  that  logic  is  mainly 
valuable  as  a  weapon  wherewith  to  exterminate 
logicians. 

But  though  this  may  be  true  enough  in  practice,  it 
scarcely  clears  up  the  position  of  logic  in  human 
affairs.  Logic  is  a  machine  of  the  mind,  and  if  it  is 
used  honestly  it  ought  to  bring  out  an  honest  con- 
clusion. When  people  say  that  you  can  prove  any- 
thing by  logic,  they  are  not  using  words  in  a  fair 
sense.  What  they  mean  is  that  you  can  prove  any- 
thing by  bad  logic.  Deep  in  the  mystic  ingratitude 
of  the  soul  of  man  there  is  an  extraordinary  tendency 
to  use  the  name  for  an  organ,  when  what  is  meant 
is  the  abuse  or  decay  of  that  organ.  Thus  we  speak 
of  a  man  suffering  from  "  nerves,"  which  is  about 
as  sensible  as  talking  about  a  man  suffering  from  ten 
[113] 


VARIED    TYPES 

fingers.  We  speak  of  "  liver  "  and  "  digestion  " 
when  we  mean  the  failure  of  liver  and  the  absence  of 
digestion.  And  in  the  same  manner  we  speak  of  the 
dangers  of  logic,  when  what  we  really  mean  is  the 
danger  of  fallacy. 

But  the  real  point  about  the  limitation  of  logic 
and  the  partial  overthrow  of  logic  by  writers  like 
Carlyle  is  deeper  and  somewhat  different.  The  fault 
of  the  great  mass  of  logicians  is  not  that  they  bring 
out  a  false  result,  or,  in  other  words,  are  not  logicians 
at  all.  Their  fault  is  that  by  an  inevitable  psycho- 
logical habit  they  tend  to  forget  that  there  are  two 
parts  of  a  logical  process,  the  first  the  choosing  of 
an  assumption,  and  the  second  the  arguing  upon  it, 
and  humanity,  if  it  devotes  itself  too  persistently  to 
the  study  of  sound  reasoning,  has  a  certain  tendency 
to  lose  the  faculty  of  sound  assumption.  It  is  aston- 
ishing how  constantly  one  may  hear  from  rational  and 
even  rationalistic  persons  such  a  phrase  as  "  He  did 
not  prove  the  very  thing  with  which  he  started,"  or, 
"  The  whole  of  his  case  rested  upon  a  pure  assump- 


THOMAS    CARLYLE 

tion,"  two  peculiarities  which  may  be  found  by  the 
curious  in  the  works  of  Euclid.  It  is  astonishing, 
again,  how  constantly  one  hears  rationalists  arguing 
upon  some  deep  topic,  apparently  without  troubling 
about  the  deep  assumptions  involved,  having  lost  their 
sense,  as  it  were,  of  the  real  colour  and  character  of 
a  man's  assumption.  For  instance,  two  men  will 
argue  about  whether  patriotism  is  a  good  thing  and 
never  discover  until  the  end,  if  at  all,  that  the  cos- 
mopolitan is  basing  his  whole  case  upon  the  idea  that 
man  should,  if  he  can,  become  as  God,  with  equal  sym- 
pathies and  no  prejudices,  while  the  nationalist 
denies  any  such  duty  at  the  very  start,  and  regards 
man  as  an  animal  who  has  preferences,  as  a  bird  has 
feathers. 

Thus  it  was  with  Carlyle :  he  startled  men  by  attack- 
ing not  arguments,  but  assumptions.  He  simply 
brushed  aside  all  the  matters  which  the  men  of  the 
nineteenth  century  held  to  be  incontrovertible,  and 
appealed  directly  to  the  very  different  class  of  matters 
[115] 


VARIED    TYPES 

which  they  knew  to  be  true.  He  induced  men  to  study 
less  the  truth  of  their  reasoning,  and  more  the  truth 
of  the  assumptions  upon  which  they  reasoned.  Even 
where  his  view  was  not  the  highest  truth,  it  was  always 
a  refreshing  and  beneficent  heresy.  He  denied  every 
one  of  the  postulates  upon  which  the  age  of  reason 
based  itself.  He  denied  the  theory  of  progress  which 
assumed  that  we  must  be  better  off  than  the  people 
of  the  twelfth  century.  Whether  we  were  better  than 
the  people  of  the  twelfth  century,  according  to  him, 
depended  entirely  upon  whether  we  chose  or  deserved 
to  be. 

He  denied  every  type  and  species  of  prop  or  asso- 
cition  or  support  which  threw  the  responsibility  upon 
civilisation  or  society,  or  anything  but  the  individual 
conscience.  He  has  often  been  called  a  prophet.  The 
real  ground  of  the  truth  of  this  phrase  is  often  neg- 
lected. Since  the  last  era  of  purely  religious  litera- 
ture, the  era  of  English  Puritanism,  there  has  been  no 
writer  in  whose  eyes  the  soul  stood  so  much  alone. 

Carlyle  was,  as  we  have  suggested,  a  mystic,  and 
[116] 


THOMAS    CARLYLE 

mysticism  was  with  him,  as  with  all  its  genuine  pro- 
fessors, only  a  transcendent  form  of  common  sense. 
Mysticism  and  common  sense  alike  consist  in  a  sense 
of  the  dominance  of  certain  truths  and  tendencies 
which  cannot  be  formally  demonstrated  or  even 
formally  named.  Mysticism  and  common  sense 
are  alike  appeals  to  realities  that  we  all  know  to 
be  real,  but  which  have  no  place  in  argument  ex- 
cept as  postulates.  Carlyle's  work  did  consist  in 
breaking  through  formulae,  old  and  new,  to  these 
old  and  silent  and  ironical  sanities.  Philosophers 
might  abolish  kings  a  hundred  times  over,  he  main- 
tained, they  could  not  alter  the  fact  that  every  man 
and  woman  does  choose  a  king  and  repudiate  all  the 
pride  of  citizenship  for  the  exultation  of  humility. 
If  inequality  of  this  kind  was  a  weakness,  it  was  a 
weakness  bound  up  with  the  very  strength  of  the  uni- 
verse. About  hero  worship,  indeed,  few  critics  have 
done  the  smallest  justice  to  Carlyle.  Misled  by  those 
hasty  and  choleric  passages  in  which  he  sometimes 
expressed  a  preference  for  mere  violence,  passages 


VARIED    TYPES 

which  were  a  great  deal  more  connected  with  his  tem- 
perament than  with  his  philosophy,  they  have  finally 
imbibed  the  notion  that  Carlyle's  theory  of  hero  wor- 
ship was  a  theory  of  terrified  submission  to  stern  and 
arrogant  men.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  Carlyle  is  really 
inhumane  about  some  questions,  but  he  is  never  in- 
humane about  hero  worship.  His  view  is  not  that 
human  nature  is  so  vulgar  and  silly  a  thing  that  it 
must  be  guided  and  driven ;  it  is,  on  the  contrary,  that 
human  nature  is  so  chivalrous  and  fundamentally 
magnanimous  a  thing  that  even  the  meanest  have  it  in 
them  to  love  a  leader  more  than  themselves,  and  to 
prefer  loyalty  to  rebellion.  When  he  speaks  of  this 
trait  in  human  nature  Carlyle's  tone  invariably 
softens.  We  feel  that  for  the  moment  he  is  kindled 
with  admiration  of  mankind,  and  almost  reaches  the 
verge  of  Christianity.  Whatever  else  was  acid  and 
captious  about  Carlyle's  utterances,  his  hero  worship 
was  not  only  humane,  it  was  almost  optimistic.  He 
admired  great  men  primarily,  and  perhaps  correctly, 
because  he  thought  that  they  were  more  human  than 
[118] 


THOMAS    CARLYLE 

other  men.  The  evil  side  of  the  influence  of  Carlyle 
and  his  religion  of  hero  worship  did  not  consist  in  the 
emotional  worship  of  valour  and  success;  that  was  a 
part  of  him,  as,  indeed,  it  is  a  part  of  all  healthy  chil- 
dren. Where  Carlyle  really  did  harm  was  in  the  fact 
that  he,  more  than  any  modern  man,  is  responsible  for 
the  increase  of  that  modern  habit  of  what  is  vulgarly 
called  "  Going  the  whole  hog."  Often  in  matters  of 
passion  and  conquest  it  is  a  singularly  hoggish  hog. 
This  remarkable  modern  craze  for  making  one's 
philosophy,  religion,  politics,  and  temper  all  of  a 
piece,  of  seeking  in  all  incidents  for  opportunities  to 
assert  and  reassert  some  favourite  mental  attitude,  is 
a  thing  which  existed  comparatively  little  in  other 
centuries.  Solomon  and  Horace,  Petrarch  and  Shakes- 
peare were  pessimists  when  they  were  melancholy, 
and  optimists  when  they  were  happy.  But  the  opti- 
mist of  to-day  seems  obliged  to  prove  that  gout  and 
unrequited  love  make  him  dance  with  joy,  and  the 
pessimist  of  to-day  to  prove  that  sunshine  and  a  good 
supper  convulse  him  with  inconsolable  anguish.  Car- 
[119] 


VARIED    TYPES 

lyle  was  strongly  possessed  with  this  mania  for  spir- 
itual consistency.  He  wished  to  take  the  same  view 
of  the  wars  of  the  angels  and  of  the  paltriest  riot  at 
Donnybrook  Fair.  It  was  this  species  of  insane  logic 
which  led  him  into  his  chief  errors,  never  his  natural 
enthusiasms.  Let  us  take  an  example.  Carlyle's 
defence  of  slavery  is  a  thoroughly  ridiculous  thing, 
weak  alike  in  argument  and  in  moral  instinct.  The 
truth  is,  that  he  only  took  it  up  from  the  passion  for 
applying  everywhere  his  paradoxical  defence  of  aris- 
tocracy. He  blundered,  of  course,  because  he  did  not 
see  that  slavery  has  nothing  in  the  world  to  do  with 
aristocracy,  that  it  is,  indeed,  almost  its  opposite. 
The  defence  which  Carlyle  and  all  its  thoughtful  de- 
fenders have  made  for  aristocracy  was  that  a  few  per- 
sons could  more  rapidly  and  firmly  decide  public 
affairs  in  the  interests  of  the  people.  But  slavery  is 
not  even  supposed  to  be  a  government  for  the  good 
of  the  governed.  It  is  a  possession  of  the  governed 
avowedly  for  the  good  of  the  governors.  Aristocracy 
uses  the  strong  for  the  service  of  the  weak;  slavery 
[120] 


THOMAS    CARLYLE 

uses  the  weak  for  the  service  of  the  strong.  It  is 
no  derogation  to  man  as  a  spiritual  being,  as  Carlyle 
firmly  believed  he  was,  that  he  should  be  ruled  and 
guided  for  his  own  good  like  a  child — for  a  child 
who  is  always  ruled  and  guided  we  regard  as  the  very 
type  of  spiritual  existence.  But  it  is  a  derogation 
and  an  absolute  contradiction  to  that  human  spiritu- 
ality in  which  Carlyle  believed  that  a  man  should  be 
owned  like  a  tool  for  someone  else's  good,  as  if  he  had 
no  personal  destiny  in  the  Cosmos.  We  draw  atten- 
tion to  this  particular  error  of  Carlyle's  because  we 
think  that  it  is  a  curious  example  of  the  waste  and 
unclean  places  into  which  that  remarkable  animal, 
"  the  whole  hog,"  more  than  once  led  him. 

In  this  respect  Carlyle  has  had  unquestionably  long 
and  an  unquestionably  bad  influence.  The  whole  of 
that  recent  political  ethic  which  conceives  that  if  we 
only  go  far  enough  we  may  finish  a  thing  for  once 
and  all,  that  being  strong  consists  chiefly  in  being 
deliberately  deaf  and  blind,  owes  a  great  deal  of  its 
complete  sway  to  his  example.  Out  of  him  flows  most 


VARIED    TYPES 

of  the  philosophy  of  Nietzsche,  who  is  in  modern 
times  the  supreme  maniac  of  this  moonstruck  con- 
sistency. Though  Nietzsche  and  Carlyle  were  in 
reality  profoundly  different,  Carlyle  being  a  stiff- 
necked  peasant  and  Nietzsche  a  very  fragile  aristo- 
crat, they  were  alike  in  this  one  quality  of  which  we 
speak,  the  strange  and  pitiful  audacity  with  which 
they  applied  their  single  ethical  test  to  everything  in 
heaven  and  earth.  The  disciple  of  Nietzsche,  in- 
deed, embraces  immorality  like  an  austere  and  difficult 
faith.  He  urges  himself  to  lust  and  cruelty  with  the 
same  tremulous  enthusiasm  with  which  a  Christian 
urges  himself  to  purity  and  patience;  he  struggles 
as  a  monk  struggles  with  bestial  visions  and  tempta- 
tions with  the  ancient  necessities  of  honour  and  jus- 
tice and  compassion.  To  this  madhouse,  it  can  hardly 
be  denied,  has  Carlyle's  intellectual  courage  brought 
many  at  last. 


[122] 


TOLSTOY  AND  THE  CULT  OF  SIMPLICITY 


TOLSTOY  AND   THE   CULT   OF 
SIMPLICITY 


1 


whole  world  is  certainly  heading  for 
a  great  simplicity,  not  deliberately,  but 
rather  inevitably.  It  is  not  a  mere  fashion 
of  false  innocence,  like  that  of  the  French  aristocrats 
before  the  Revolution,  who  built  an  altar  to  Pan,  and 
who  taxed  the  peasantry  for  the  enormous  expenditure 
which  is  needed  in  order  to  live  the  simple  life  of 
peasants.  The  simplicity  towards  which  the  world 
is  driving  is  the  necessary  outcome  of  all  our  systems 
and  speculations  and  of  our  deep  and  continuous  con- 
templation of  things.  For  the  universe  is  like  every- 
thing in  it ;  we  have  to  look  at  it  repeatedly  and  habit- 
ually before  we  see  it.  It  is  only  when  we  have  seen  it 
for  the  hundredth  time  that  we  see  it  for  the  first 
time.  The  more  consistently  things  are  contem- 
[125] 


VARIED    TYPES 

plated,  the  more  they  tend  to  unify  themselves  and 
therefore  to  simplify  themselves.  The  simplification 
of  anything  is  always  sensational.  Thus  monotheism 
is  the  most  sensational  of  things:  it  is  as  if  we  gazed 
long  at  a  design  full  of  disconnected  objects,  and, 
suddenly,  with  a  stunning  thrill,  they  came  together 
into  a  huge  and  staring  face. 

Few  people  will  dispute  that  all  the  typical  move- 
ments of  our  time  are  upon  this  road  towards  simpli- 
fication. Each  system  seeks  to  be  more  fundamental 
than  the  other;  each  seeks,  in  the  literal  sense,  to 
undermine  the  other.  In  art,  for  example,  the  old 
conception  of  man,  classic  as  the  Apollo  Belvedere,  has 
first  been  attacked  by  the  realist,  who  asserts  that 
man,  as  a  fact  of  natural  history,  is  a  creature  with 
colourless  hair  and  a  freckled  face.  Then  comes  the 
Impressionist,  going  yet  deeper,  who  asserts  that  to 
his  physical  eye,  which  alone  is  certain,  man  is  a 
creature  with  purple  hair  and  a  grey  face.  Then 
comes  the  Symbolist,  and  says  that  to  his  soul,  which 
alone  is  certain,  man  is  a  creature  with  green  hair  and 
[126] 


TOLSTOY 

a  blue  face.  And  all  the  great  writers  of  our  time 
represent  in  one  form  or  another  this  attempt  to  re- 
establish communication  with  the  elemental,  or,  as  it 
is  sometimes  more  roughly  and  fallaciously  expressed, 
to  return  to  nature.  Some  think  that  the  return  to 
nature  consists  in  drinking  no  wine;  some  think  that 
it  consists  in  drinking  a  great  deal  more  than  is  good 
for  them.  Some  think  that  the  return  to  nature  is 
achieved  by  beating  swords  into  ploughshares ;  some 
think  it  is  achieved  by  turning  ploughshares  into  very 
ineffectual  British  War  Office  bayonets.  It  is  natural, 
according  to  the  Jingo,  for  a  man  to  kill  other  people 
with  gunpowder  and  himself  with  gin.  It  is  natural, 
according  to  the  humanitarian  revolutionist,  to  kill 
other  people  with  dynamite  and  himself  with  vege- 
tarianism. It  would  be  too  obviously  Philistine  a 
sentiment,  perhaps,  to  suggest  that  the  claim  of  either 
of  these  persons  to  be  obeying  the  voice  of  nature  is 
interesting  when  we  consider  that  they  require  huge 
volumes  of  paradoxical  argument  to  persuade  them- 
selves or  anyone  else  of  the  truth  of  their  conclusions. 
[127] 


VARIED    TYPES 

But  the  giants  of  our  time  are  undoubtedly  alike  in 
that  they  approach  by  very  different  roads  this  con- 
ception of  the  return  to  simplicity.  Ibsen  returns 
to  nature  by  the  angular  exterior  of  fact,  Maeterlinck 
by  the  eternal  tendencies  of  fable.  Whitman  returns 
to  nature  by  seeing  how  much  he  can  accept,  Tolstoy 
by  seeing  how  much  he  can  reject. 

Now,  this  heroic  desire  to  return  to  nature,  is,  of 
course,  in  some  respects,  rather  like  the  heroic  desire 
of  a  kitten  to  return  to  its  own  tail.  A  tail  is  a  simple 
and  beautiful  object,  rhythmic  in  curve  and  soothing 
in  texture;  but  it  is  certainly  one  of  the  minor  but 
characteristic  qualities  of  a  tail  that  it  should  hang 
behind.  It  is  impossible  to  deny  that  it  would  in  some 
degree  lose  its  character  if  attached  to  any  other  part 
of  the  anatomy.  Now,  nature  is  like  a  tail  in  the 
sense  that  it  vitally  important,  if  it  is  to  discharge 
its  real  duty,  that  it  should  be  always  behind.  To 
imagine  that  we  can  see  nature,  especially  our  own 
nature,  face  to  face,  is  a  folly ;  it  is  even  a  blasphemy. 
It  is  like  the  conduct  of  a  cat  in  some  mad  fairy-tale, 
[128] 


TOLSTOY 

who  should  set  out  on  his  travels  with  the  firm  con- 
viction that  he  would  find  his  tail  growing  like  a  tree 
in  the  meadows  at  the  end  of  the  world.  And  the 
actual  effect  of  the  travels  of  the  philosopher  in  search 
of  nature,  when  seen  from  the  outside,  looks  very  like 
the  gyrations  of  the  tail-pursuing  kitten,  exhibiting 
much  enthusiasm  but  little  dignity,  much  cry  and 
very  little  tail.  The  grandeur  of  nature  is  that  she 
is  omnipotent  and  unseen,  that  she  is  perhaps  ruling 
us  most  when  we  think  that  she  is  heeding  us  least. 
"  Thou  art  a  God  that  hidest  Thyself,"  said  the  He- 
brew poet.  It  may  be  said  with  all  reverence  that  it 
is  behind  a  man's  back  that  the  spirit  of  nature 
hides. 

It  is  this  consideration  that  lends  a  certain  air  of 
futility  even  to  all  the  inspired  simplicities  and  thun- 
derous veracities  of  Tolstoy.  We  feel  that  a  man 
cannot  make  himself  simple  merely  by  warring  on 
complexity;  we  feel,  indeed,  in  our  saner  moments, 
that  a  man  cannot  make  himself  simple  at  all.  A 
self-conscious  simplicity  may  well  be  far  more  intrin- 
[129] 


VARIED    TYPES 

sically  ornate  than  luxury  itself.  Indeed,  a  great 
deal  of  the  pomp  and  sumptuousness  of  the  world's 
history  was  simple  in  the  truest  sense.  It  was  born 
of  an  almost  babyish  receptiveness ;  it  was  the  work 
of  men  who  had  eyes  to  wonder  and  men  who  had  ears 
to  hear. 

"  King  Solomon  brought  merchant  men 

Because  of  his  desire 
With  peacocks,  apes,  and  ivory, 
From  Tarshish  unto  Tyre." 

But  this  proceeding  was  not  a  part  of  the  wisdom  of 
Solomon;  it  was  a  part  of  his  folly — I  had  almost 
said  of  his  innocence.  Tolstoy,  we  feel,  would  not  be 
content  with  hurling  satire  and  denunciation  at  "  Sol- 
omon in  all  his  glory."  With  fierce  and  unimpeach- 
able logic  he  would  go  a  step  further.  He  would 
spend  days  and  nights  in  the  meadows  stripping  the 
shameless  crimson  coronals  off  the  lilies  of  the  field. 

The  new  collection  of  "  Tales  from  Tolstoy,"  trans- 
lated and  edited  by  Mr.  R.  Nisbet  Bain,  is  calculated 
to  draw  particular  attention  to  this  ethical  and  ascetic 
[130] 


TOLSTOY 

side  of  Tolstoy's  work.  In  one  sense,  and  that  the 
deepest  sense,  the  work  of  Tolstoy  is,  of  course,  a 
genuine  and  noble  appeal  to  simplicity.  The  nar- 
row notion  that  an  artist  may  not  teach  is  pretty 
well  exploded  by  now.  But  the  truth  of  the  mat- 
ter is,  that  an  artist  teaches  far  more  by  his  mere 
background  and  properties,  his  landscape,  his  cos- 
tume, his  idiom  and  technique — all  the  part  of  his 
work,  in  short,  of  which  he  is  probably  entirely  un- 
conscious, than  by  the  elaborate  and  pompous  moral 
dicta  which  he  fondly  imagines  to  be  his  opinions. 
The  real  distinction  between  the  ethics  of  high  art 
and  the  ethics  of  manufactured  and  didactic  art  lies 
in  the  simple  fact  that  the  bad  fable  has  a  moral,  while 
the  good  fable  is  a  moral.  And  the  real  moral  of 
Tolstoy  comes  out  constantly  in  these  stories,  the  great 
moral  which  lies  at  the  heart  of  all  his  work,  of  which 
he  is  probably  unconscious,  and  of  which  it  is  quite 
likely  that  he  would  vehemently  disapprove.  The 
curious  cold  white  light  of  morning  that  shines  over 
all  the  tales,  the  folklore  simplicity  with  which  "  a 
[131] 


VARIED    TYPES 

man  or  a  woman  "  are  spoken  of  without  further  iden- 
tification, the  love — one  might  almost  say  the  lust — 
for  the  qualities  of  brute  materials,  the  hardness  of 
wood,  and  the  softness  of  mud,  the  ingrained  belief 
in  a  certain  ancient  kindliness  sitting  beside  the  very 
cradle  of  the  race  of  man — these  influences  are  truly 
moral.  When  we  put  beside  them  the  trumpeting 
and  tearing  nonsense  of  the  didactic  Tolstoy,  scream- 
ing for  an  obscene  purity,  shouting  for  an  inhuman 
peace,  hacking  up  human  life  into  small  sins  with  a 
chopper,  sneering  at  men,  women,  and  children  out 
of  respect  to  humanity,  combining  in  one  chaos  of 
contradictions  an  unmanly  Puritan  and  an  uncivil- 
ised prig,  then,  indeed,  we  scarcely  know  whither  Tol- 
stoy has  vanished.  We  know  not  what  to  do  with 
this  small  and  noisy  moralist  who  is  inhabiting  one 
corner  of  a  great  and  good  man. 

It  is  difficult  in  every  case  to  reconcile  Tolstoy  the 
great  artist  with  Tolstoy  the  almost  venomous  re- 
former.   It  is  difficult  to  believe  that  a  man  who  draws 
in  such  noble  outlines  the  dignity  of  the  daily  life 
[132] 


TOLSTOY 

of  humanity  regards  as  evil  that  divine  act  of  pro- 
creation by  which  that  dignity  is  renewed  from  age 
to  age.  It  is  difficult  to  believe  that  a  man  who  has 
painted  with  so  frightful  an  honesty  the  heartrending 
emptiness  of  the  life  of  the  poor  can  really  grudge 
them  every  one  of  their  pitiful  pleasures,  from  court- 
ship to  tobacco.  It  is  difficult  to  believe  that  a  poet 
in  prose  who  has  so  powerfully  exhibited  the  earth- 
born  air  of  man,  the  essential  kinship  of  a  human 
being,  with  the  landscape  in  which  he  lives,  can  deny 
so  elemental  a  virtue  as  that  which  attaches  a  man  to 
his  own  ancestors  and  his  own  land.  It  is  difficult  to 
believe  that  the  man  who  feels  so  poignantly  the  de- 
testable insolence  of  oppression  would  not  actually,  if 
he  had  the  chance,  lay  the  oppressor  flat  with  his  fist. 
All,  however,  arises  from  the  search  after  a  false  sim- 
plicity, the  aim  of  being,  if  I  may  so  express  it,  more 
natural  than  it  is  natural  to  be.  It  would  not  only 
be  more  human,  it  would  be  more  humble  of  us  to  be 
content  to  be  complex.  The  truest  kinship  with 
humanity  would  lie  in  doing  as  humanity  has  always 
[133] 


VARIED    TYPES 

done,  accepting  with  a  sportsmanlike  relish  the  estate 
to  which  we  are  called,  the  star  of  our  happiness,  and 
the  fortunes  of  the  land  of  our  birth. 

The  work  of  Tolstoy  has  another  and  more  special 
significance.  It  represents  the  re-assertion  of  a  cer- 
tain awful  common  sense  which  characterised  the  most 
extreme  utterances  of  Christ.  It  is  true  that  we 
cannot  turn  the  cheek  to  the  smiter;  it  is  true  that 
we  cannot  give  our  cloak  to  the  robber;  civilisation 
is  too  complicated,  too  vain-glorious,  too  emotional. 
The  robber  would  brag,  and  we  should  blush ;  in  other 
words,  the  robber  and  we  are  alike  sentimentalists. 
The  command  of  Christ  is  impossible,  but  it  is  not 
insane;  it  is  rather  sanity  preached  to  a  planet  of 
lunatics.  If  the  whole  world  was  suddenly  stricken 
with  a  sense  of  humour  it  would  find  itself  mechani- 
cally fulfilling  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount.  It  is  not 
the  plain  facts  of  the  world  which  stand  in  the  way 
of  that  consummation,  but  its  passions  of  vanity  and 
self-advertisement  and  morbid  sensibility.  It  is  true 
that  we  cannot  turn  the  cheek  to  the  smiter,  and  the 
[134] 


TOLSTOY 

sole  and  sufficient  reason  is  that  we  have  not  the  pluck. 
Tolstoy  and  his  followers  have  shown  that  they  have 
the  pluck,  and  even  if  we  think  they  are  mistaken,  by 
this  sign  they  conquer.  Their  theory  has  the  strength 
of  an  utterly  consistent  thing.  It  represents  that 
doctrine  of  mildness  and  non-resistance  which  is  the 
last  and  most  audacious  of  all  the  forms  of  resistance 
to  every  existing  authority.  It  is  the  great  strike 
of  the  Quakers  which  is  more  formidable  than  many 
sanguinary  revolutions.  If  human  beings  could  only 
succeed  in  achieving  a  real  passive  resistance  they 
would  be  strong  with  the  appalling  strength  of  inani- 
mate things,  they  would  be  calm  with  the  maddening 
calm  of  oak  or  iron,  which  conquer  without  vengeance 
and  are  conquered  without  humiliation.  The  theory 
of  Christian  duty  enunciated  by  them  is  that  we  should 
never  conquer  by  force,  but  always,  if  we  can,  con- 
quer by  persuasion.  In  their  mythology  St.  George 
did  not  conquer  the  dragon:  he  tied  a  pink  ribbon 
round  its  neck  and  gave  it  a  saucer  of  milk.  Accord- 
ing to  them,  a  course  of  consistent  kindness  to  Nero 
[135] 


VARIED    TYPES 

would  have  turned  him  into  something  only  faintly 
represented  by  Alfred  the  Great.  In  fact,  the  policy 
recommended  by  this  school  for  dealing  with  the 
bovine  stupidity  and  bovine  fury  of  this  world  is  ac- 
curately summed  up  in  the  celebrated  verse  of  Mr. 
Edward  Lear: 

"  There  was  an  old  man  who  said,  '  How 
Shall  I  flee  from  this  terrible  cow  ? 
I  will  sit  on  a  stile  and  continue  to  smile 
Till  I  soften  the  heart  of  this  cow.' " 

Their  confidence  in  human  nature  is  really  honour- 
able and  magnificent ;  it  takes  the  form  of  refusing 
to  believe  the  overwhelming  majority  of  mankind,  even 
when  they  set  out  to  explain  their  own  motives.  But 
although  most  of  us  would  in  all  probability  tend  at 
first  sight  to  consider  this  new  sect  of  Christians  as 
little  less  outrageous  than  some  brawling  and  absurd 
sect  in  the  Reformation,  yet  we  should  fall  into  a 
singular  error  in  doing  so.  The  Christianity  of  Tol- 
stoy is,  when  we  come  to  consider  it,  one  of  the  most 
thrilling  and  dramatic  incidents  in  our  modern  civili- 
[136] 


TOLSTOY 

sation.  It  represents  a  tribute  to  the  Christian  reli- 
gion more  sensational  than  the  breaking  of  seals  or 
the  falling  of  stars. 

From  the  point  of  view  of  a  rationalist,  the  whole 
world  is  rendered  almost  irrational  by  the  single  phe- 
nomenon of  Christian  Socialism.  It  turns  the  scien- 
tific universe  topsy-turvy,  and  makes  it  essentially 
possible  that  the  key  of  all  social  evolution  may  be 
found  in  the  dusty  casket  of  some  discredited  creed. 
It  cannot  be  amiss  to  consider  this  phenomenon  as  it 
really  is. 

The  religion  of  Christ  has,  like  many  true  things, 
been  disproved  an  extraordinary  number  of  times.  It 
was  disproved  by  the  Neo-Platonist  philosophers  at 
the  very  moment  when  it  was  first  starting  forth  upon 
its  startling  and  universal  career.  It  was  disproved 
again  by  many  of  the  sceptics  of  the  Renaissance  only 
a  few  years  before  its  second  and  supremely  striking 
embodiment,  the  religion  of  Puritanism,  was  about 
to  triumph  over  many  kings  and  civilise  many  con- 
tinents. We  all  agree  that  these  schools  of  negation 
[137] 


VARIED    TYPES 

were  only  interludes  in  its  history ;  but  we  all  believe 
naturally  and  inevitably  that  the  negation  of  our  own 
day  is  really  a  breaking  up  of  the  theological  cosmos, 
an  Armageddon,  a  Ragnorak,  a  twilight  of  the  gods. 
The  man  of  the  nineteenth  century,  like  a  schoolboy 
of  sixteen,  believes  that  his  doubt  and  depression  are 
symbols  of  the  end  of  the  world.  In  our  day  the 
great  irreligionists  who  did  nothing  but  dethrone  God 
and  drive  angels  before  them  have  been  outstripped, 
distanced,  and  made  to  look  orthodox  and  humdrum. 
A  newer  race  of  sceptics  has  found  something  in- 
finitely more  exciting  to  do  than  nailing  down  the 
lids  upon  a  million  coffins,  and  the  body  upon  a  single 
cross.  They  have  disputed  not  only  the  elementary 
creeds,  but  the  elementary  laws  of  mankind,  property, 
patriotism,  civil  obedience.  They  have  arraigned 
civilisation  as  openly  as  the  materialists  have  ar- 
raigned theology;  they  have  damned  all  the  philos- 
ophers even  lower  than  they  have  damned  the  saints. 
Thousands  of  modern  men  move  quietly  and  conven- 
tionally among  their  fellows  while  holding  views  of 
[138] 


TOLSTOY 

national  limitation  or  landed  property  that  would 
have  made  Voltaire  shudder  like  a  nun  listening  to 
blasphemies.  And  the  last  and  wildest  phase  of  this 
saturnalia  of  scepticism,  the  school  that  goes  furthest 
among  thousands  who  go  so  far,  the  school  that  denies 
the  moral  validity  of  those  ideals  of  courage  or  obedi- 
ence which  are  recognised  even  among  pirates,  this 
school  bases  itself  upon  the  literal  words  of  Christ, 
like  Dr.  Watts  or  Messrs.  Moody  and  Sankey.  Never 
in  the  whole  history  of  the  world  was  such  a  tremen- 
dous tribute  paid  to  the  vitality  of  an  ancient  creed. 
Compared  with  this,  it  would  be  a  small  thing  if  the 
Red  Sea  were  cloven  asunder,  or  the  sun  did  stand  still 
at  midday.  We  are  faced  with  the  phenomenon  that 
a  set  of  revolutionists  whose  contempt  for  all  the 
ideals  of  family  and  nation  would  evoke  horror  in  a 
thieves'  kitchen,  who  can  rid  themselves  of  those  ele- 
mentary instincts  of  the  man  and  the  gentleman 
which  cling  to  the  very  bones  of  our  civilisation, 
cannot  rid  themselves  of  the  influence  of  two  or 
three  remote  Oriental  anecdotes  written  in  corrupt 
[139] 


VARIED    TYPES 

Greek.  The  fact,  when  realised,  has  about  it  some- 
thing stunning  and  hypnotic.  The  most  convinced 
rationalist  is  in  its  presence  suddenly  stricken  with 
a  strange  and  ancient  vision,  sees  the  immense  scep- 
tical cosmogonies  of  this  age  as  dreams  going  the 
way  of  a  thousand  forgotten  heresies,  and  believes  for 
a  moment  that  the  dark  sayings  handed  down  through 
eighteen  centuries  may,  indeed,  contain  in  themselves 
the  revolutions  of  which  we  have  only  begun  to 
dream. 

This  value  which  we  have  above  suggested  un- 
questionably belongs  to  the  Tolstoians,  who  may 
roughly  be  described  as  the  new  Quakers.  With  their 
strange  optimism,  and  their  almost  appalling  logical 
courage,  they  offer  a  tribute  to  Christianity  which 
no  orthodoxies  could  offer.  It  cannot  but  be  remark- 
able to  watch  a  revolution  in  which  both  the  rulers 
and  the  rebels  march  under  the  same  symbol.  But 
the  actual  theory  of  non-resistance  itself,  with  all  its 
kindred  theories,  is  not,  I  think,  characterised  by  that 
intellectual  obviousness  and  necessity  which  its  sup- 
[140] 


TOLSTOY 

porters  claim  for  it.  A  pamphlet  before  us  shows 
us  an  extraordinary  number  of  statements  about  the 
new  Testament,  of  which  the  accuracy  is  by  no  means 
so  striking  as  the  confidence.  To  begin  with,  we  must 
protest  against  a  habit  of  quoting  and  paraphrasing 
at  the  same  time.  When  a  man  is  discussing  what 
Jesus  meant,  let  him  state  first  of  all  what  He  said, 
not  what  the  man  thinks  He  would  have  said  if  he 
had  expressed  Himself  more  clearly.  Here  is  an  in- 
stance of  question  and  answer : 

Q.  "  How  did  our  Master  Himself  sum  up  the 
law  in  a  few  words  ?  " 

A.  "  Be  ye  merciful,  be  ye  perfect  even  as  your 
Father;  your  Father  in  the  spirit  world  is  merciful, 
is  perfect." 

There  is  nothing  in  this,  perhaps,  which  Christ 
might  not  have  said  except  the  abominable  meta- 
physical modernism  of  "  the  spirit  world  " ;  but  to 
say  that  it  is  recorded  that  He  did  say  it,  is  like  say- 
ing it  is  recorded  that  He  preferred  palm  trees  to 
sycamores.  It  is  a  simple  and  unadulterated  un- 


VARIED    TYPES 

truth.  The  author  should  know  that  these  words 
have  meant  a  thousand  things  to  a  thousand  people, 
and  that  if  more  ancient  sects  had  paraphrased  them 
as  cheerfully  as  he,  he  would  never  have  had  the 
text  upon  which  he  founds  his  theory.  In  a  pamphlet 
in  which  plain  printed  words  cannot  be  left  alone,  it 
is  not  surprising  if  there  are  mis-statements  upon 
larger  matters.  Here  is  a  statement  clearly  and  philo- 
sophically laid  down  which  we  can  only  content  our- 
selves with  flatly  denying :  "  The  fifth  rule  of  our 
Lord  is  that  we  should  take  special  pains  to  cultivate 
the  same  kind  of  regard  for  people  of  foreign  coun- 
tries, and  for  those  generally  who  do  not  belong  to 
us,  or  even  have  an  antipathy  to  us,  which  we  already 
entertain  towards  our  own  people,  and  those  who  are 
in  sympathy  with  us."  I  should  very  much  like  to 
know  where  in  the  whole  of  the  New  Testament  the 
author  finds  this  violent,  unnatural,  and  immoral 
proposition.  Christ  did  not  have  the  same  kind  of  re- 
gard for  one  person  as  for  another.  We  are  specifi- 
cally told  that  there  were  certain  persons  whom  He 


TOLSTOY 

specially  loved.  It  is  most  improbable  that  He 
thought  of  other  nations  as  He  thought  of  His  own. 
The  sight  of  His  national  city  moved  Him  to  tears, 
and  the  highest  compliment  He  paid  was,  "  Behold 
an  Israelite  indeed."  The  author  has  simply  con- 
fused two  entirely  distinct  things.  Christ  com- 
manded us  to  have  love  for  all  men,  but  even  if  we 
had  equal  love  for  all  men,  to  speak  of  having  the 
same  love  for  all  men  is  merely  bewildering  nonsense. 
If  we  love  a  man  at  all,  the  impression  he  produces 
on  us  must  be  vitally  different  to  the  impression  pro- 
duced by  another  man  whom  we  love.  To  speak  of 
having  the  same  kind  of  regard  for  both  is  about  as 
sensible  as  asking  a  man  whether  he  prefers  chrysan- 
themums or  billiards.  Christ  did  not  love  humanity; 
He  never  said  He  loved  humanity;  He  loved  men. 
Neither  He  nor  anyone  else  can  love  humanity;  it  is 
like  loving  a  gigantic  centipede.  And  the  reason 
that  the  Tolstoians  can  even  endure  to  think  of  an 
equally  distributed  affection  is  that  their  love  of 
humanity  is  a  logical  love,  a  love  into  which  they  are 
[143] 


VARIED    TYPES 

coerced  by  their  own  theories,  a  love  which  would 
be  an  insult  to  a  tom-cat. 

But  the  greatest  error  of  all  lies  in  the  mere  act 
of  cutting  up  the  teaching  of  the  New  Testament 
into  five  rules.  It  precisely  and  ingeniously  misses 
the  most  dominant  characteristic  of  the  teaching — 
its  absolute  spontaneity.  The  abyss  between  Christ 
and  all  His  modern  interpreters  is  that  we  have  no 
record  that  He  ever  wrote  a  word,  except  with  His 
finger  in  the  sand.  The  whole  is  the  history  of  one 
continuous  and  sublime  conversation.  Thousands  of 
rules  have  been  deduced  from  it  before  these  Tol- 
stoian  rules  were  made,  and  thousands  will  be  de- 
duced afterwards.  It  was  not  for  any  pompous  proc- 
lamation, it  was  not  for  any  elaborate  output  of 
printed  volumes;  it  was  for  a  few  splendid  and  idle 
words  that  the  cross  was  set  up  on  Calvary,  and  the 
earth  gaped,  and  the  sun  was  darkened  at  noonday. 


[  144  ] 


SAVONAROLA 


SAVONAROLA 

SAVONAROLA  is  a  man  whom  we  shall  prob- 
ably never  understand  until  we  know  what 
horror  may  lie  at  the  heart  of  civilisation. 
This  we  shall  not  know  until  we  are  civilised.     It 
may  be  hoped,  in  one  sense,  that  we  may  never  under- 
stand Savonarola. 

The  great  deliverers  of  men  have,  for  the  most 
part,  saved  them  from  calamities  which  we  all  recog- 
nise as  evil,  from  calamities  which  are  the  ancient 
enemies  of  humanity.  The  great  law-givers  saved  us 
from  anarchy:  the  great  physicians  saved  us  from 
pestilence :  the  great  reformers  saved  us  from  starva- 
tion. But  there  is  a  huge  and  bottomless  evil  com- 
pared with  which  all  these  are  fleabites,  the  most  deso- 
lating curse  that  can  fall  upon  men  or  nations,  and  it 
has  no  name  except  we  call  it  satisfaction.  Savon- 
[147] 


VARIED    TYPES 

arola  did  not  save  men  from  anarchy,  but  from  order ; 
not  from  pestilence,  but  from  paralysis;  not  from 
starvation,  but  from  luxury.  Men  like  Savonarola 
are  the  witnesses  to  the  tremendous  psychological  fact 
at  the  back  of  all  our  brains,  but  for  which  no  name 
has  ever  been  found,  that  ease  is  the  worst  enemy  of 
happiness,  and  civilisation  potentially  the  end  of  man. 
For  I  fancy  that  Savonarola's  thrilling  challenge 
to  the  luxury  of  his  day  went  far  deeper  than  the 
mere  question  of  sin.  The  modern  rationalistic  ad- 
mirers of  Savonarola,  from  George  Eliot  downwards, 
dwell,  truly  enough,  upon  the  sound  ethical  justifica- 
tion of  Savonarola's  anger,  upon  the  hideous  and 
extravagant  character  of  the  crimes  which  polluted 
the  palaces  of  the  Renaissance.  But  they  need  not 
be  so  anxious  to  show  that  Savonarola  was  no  ascetic, 
that  he  merely  picked  out  the  black  specks  of  wicked- 
ness with  the  priggish  enlightenment  of  a  member 
of  an  Ethical  Society.  Probably  he  did  hate  the 
civilisation  of  his  time,  and  not  merely  its  sins;  and 
that  is  precisely  where  he  was  infinitely  more  pro- 
[148] 


SAVONAROLA 

found  than  a  modern  moralist.  He  saw.  that  the 
actual  crimes  were  not  the  only  evils:  that  stolen 
jewels  and  poisoned  wine  and  obscene  pictures  were 
merely  the  symptoms ;  that  the  disease  was  the  com- 
plete dependence  upon  jewels  and  wine  and  pictures. 
This  is  a  thing  constantly  forgotten  in  judging  of 
ascetics  and  Puritans  in  old  times.  A  denunciation 
of  harmless  sports  did  not  always  mean  an  ignorant 
hatred  of  what  no  one  but  a  narrow  moralist  would 
call  harmful.  Sometimes  it  meant  an  exceedingly 
enlightened  hatred  of  what  no  one  but  a  narrow  moral- 
ist would  call  harmless.  Ascetics  are  sometimes  more 
advanced  than  the  average  man,  as  well  as  less. 

Such,  at  least,  was  the  hatred  in  the  heart  of  Savo- 
narola. He  was  making  war  against  no  trivial  human 
sins,  but  against  godless  and  thankless  quiescence, 
against  getting  used  to  happiness,  the  mystic  sin  by 
which  all  creation  fell.  He  was  preaching  that  sever- 
ity which  is  the  sign-manual  of  youth  and  hope.  He 
was  preaching  that  alertness,  that  clean  agility  and 
vigilance,  which  is  as  necessary  to  gain  pleasure  as 
[149] 


VARIED    TYPES 

to  gain  holiness,  as  indispensable  in  a  lover  as  in  a 
monk.  A  critic  has  truly  pointed  out  that  Savona- 
rola could  not  have  been  fundamentally  anti-aesthetic, 
since  he  had  such  friends  as  Michael  Angelo,  Botti- 
celli, and  Luca  della  Robbia.  The  fact  is  that  this 
purification  and  austerity  are  even  more  necessary 
for  the  appreciation  of  life  and  laughter  than  for  any- 
thing else.  To  let  no  bird  fly  past  unnoticed,  to  spell 
patiently  the  stones  and  weeds,  to  have  the  mind  a 
storehouse  of  sunset,  requires  a  discipline  in  pleasure, 
and  an  education  in  gratitude. 

The  civilisation  which  surrounded  Savonarola  on 
every  side  was  a  civilisation  which  had  already  taken 
the  wrong  turn,  the  turn  that  leads  to  endless  inven- 
tions and  no  discoveries,  in  which  new  things  grow 
old  with  confounding  rapidity,  but  in  which  no  old 
things  ever  grow  new.  The  monstrosity  of  the  crimes 
of  the  Renaissance  was  not  a  mark  of  imagination; 
it  was  a  mark,  as  all  monstrosity  is,  of  the  loss  of 
imagination.  It  is  only  when  a  man  has  really  ceased 
to  see  a  horse  as  it  is,  that  he  invents  a  centaur,  only 
[150] 


SAVONAROLA 

when  he  can  no  longer  be  surprised  at  an  ox,  that  he 
worships  the  devil.  Diablerie  is  the  stimulant  of  the 
jaded  fancy;  it  is  the  dram-drinking  of  the  artist. 
Savonarola  addressed  himself  to  the  hardest  of  all 
earthly  tasks,  that  of  making  men  turn  back  and 
wonder  at  the  simplicities  they  had  learnt  to  ignore. 
It  is  strange  that  the  most  unpopular  of  all  doctrines 
is  the  doctrine  which  declares  the  common  life  divine. 
Democracy,  of  which  Savonarola  was  so  fiery  an  ex- 
ponent, is  the  hardest  of  gospels;  there  is  nothing 
that  so  terrifies  men  as  the  decree  that  they  are  all 
kings.  Christianity,  in  Savonarola's  mind,  identical 
with  democracy,  is  the  hardest  of  gospels;  there  is 
nothing  that  so  strikes  men  with  fear  as  the  saying 
that  they  are  all  the  sons  of  God. 

Savonarola  and  his  republic  fell.  The  drug  of 
despotism  was  administered  to  the  people,  and  they 
forgot  what  they  had  been.  There  are  some  at  the 
present  day  who  have  so  strange  a  respect  for  art  and 
letters,  and  for  mere  men  of  genius,  that  they  conceive 
the  reign  of  the  Medici  to  be  an  improvement  on  that 
[151] 


VARIED    TYPES 

of  the  great  Florentine  republican.  It  is  such  men 
as  these  and  their  civilisation  that  we  have  at  the 
present  day  to  fear.  We  are  surrounded  on  many 
sides  by  the  same  symptoms  as  those  which  awoke  the 
unquenchable  wrath  of  Savonarola — a  hedonism  that 
is  more  sick  of  happiness  than  an  invalid  is  sick  of 
pain,  an  art  sense  that  seeks  the  assistance  of  crime 
since  it  has  exhausted  nature.  In  many  modern  works 
we  find  veiled  and  horrible  hints  of  a  truly  Renais- 
sance sense  of  the  beauty  of  blood,  the  poetry  of  mur- 
der. The  bankrupt  and  depraved  imagination  does 
not  see  that  a  living  man  is  far  more  dramatic  than  a 
dead  one.  Along  with  this,  as  in  the  time  of  the 
Medici,  goes  the  falling  back  into  the  arms  of  despot- 
ism, the  hunger  for  the  strong  man  which  is  unknown 
among  strong  men.  The  masterful  hero  is  worshipped 
as  he  is  worshipped  by  the  readers  of  the  "  Bow  Bells 
Novelettes,"  and  for  the  same  reason — a  profound 
sense  of  personal  weakness.  That  tendency  to  de- 
volve our  duties  descends  on  us,  which  is  the  soul  of 
slavery,  alike  whether  for  its  menial  tasks  it  employs 
[152] 


SAVONAROLA 

serfs  or  emperors.  Against  all  this  the  great  clerical 
republican  stands  in  everlasting  protest,  preferring 
his  failure  to  his  rival's  success.  The  issue  is  still  be- 
tween him  and  Lorenzo,  between  the  responsibilities  of 
liberty  and  the  license  of  slavery,  between  the  perils 
of  truth  and  the  security  of  silence,  between  the  pleas- 
ure of  toil  and  the  toil  of  pleasure.  The  supporters 
of  Lorenzo  the  Magnificent  are  assuredly  among  us, 
men  for  whom  even  nations  and  empires  only  exist  to 
satisfy  the  moment,  men  to  whom  the  last  hot  hour 
of  summer  is  better  than  a  sharp  and  wintry  spring. 
They  have  an  art,  a  literature,  a  political  philosophy, 
which  are  all  alike  valued  for  their  immediate  effect 
upon  the  taste,  not  for  what  they  promise  of  the 
destiny  of  the  spirit.  Their  statuettes  and  sonnets 
are  rounded  and  perfect,  while  "  Macbeth  "  is  in  com- 
parison a  fragment,  and  the  Moses  of  Michael  Angelo 
a  hint.  Their  campaigns  and  battles  are  always 
called  triumphant,  while  Caesar  and  Cromwell  wept 
for  many  humiliations.  And  the  end  of  it  all  is  the 
hell  of  no  resistance,  the  hell  of  an  unfathomable  soft- 
[153] 


VARIED    TYPES 

ness,  until  the  whole  nature  recoils  into  madness  and 
the  chamber  of  civilisation  is  no  longer  merely  a 
cushioned  apartment,  but  a  padded  cell. 

This  last  and  worst  of  human  miseries  Savonarola 
saw  afar  off,  and  bent  his  whole  gigantic  energies 
to  turning  the  chariot  into  another  course.  Few  men 
understood  his  object;  some  called  him  a  madman, 
some  a  charlatan,  some  an  enemy  of  human  joy.  They 
would  not  even  have  understood  if  he  had  told  them, 
if  he  had  said  that  he  was  saving  them  from  a  calamity 
of  contentment  which  should  be  the  end  of  joys  and 
sorrows  alike.  But  there  are  those  to-day  who  feel 
the  same  silent  danger,  and  who  bend  themselves  to  the 
same  silent  resistance.  They  also  are  supposed  to  be 
contending  for  some  trivial  political  scruple. 

Mr.  M'Hardy  says,  in  defending  Savonarola,  that 
the  number  of  fine  works  of  art  destroyed  in  the  Burn- 
ing of  the  Vanities  has  been  much  exaggerated.  I 
confess  that  I  hope  the  pile  contained  stacks  of  incom- 
parable masterpieces  if  the  sacrifice  made  that  one  real 
moment  more  real.  Of  one  thing  I  am  sure,  that 
[154] 


SAVONAROLA 

Savonarola's  friend  Michael  Angelo  would  have  piled 
all  his  own  statues  one  on  top  of  the  other,  and  burnt 
them  to  ashes,  if  only  he  had  been  certain  that  the 
glow  transfiguring  the  sky  was  the  dawn  of  a  younger 
and  wiser  world. 


[155] 


THE    POSITION   OF    SIR   WALTER   SCOTT 


THE    POSITION    OF    SIR    WALTER    SCOTT 

WALTER  SCOTT  is  a  writer  who  should 
just  now  be  re-emerging  into  his  own 
high  place  in  letters,  for  unquestionably 
the  recent,  though  now  dwindling,  schools  of  severely 
technical  and  aesthetic  criticism  have  been  unfavour- 
able to  him.  He  was  a  chaotic  and  unequal  writer, 
and  if  there  is  one  thing  in  which  artists  have  im- 
proved since  his  time,  it  is  in  consistency  and  equality. 
It  would  perhaps  be  unkind  to  inquire  whether  the 
level  of  the  modern  man  of  letters,  as  compared  with 
Scott,  is  due  to  the  absence  of  valleys  or  the  absence 
of  mountains.  But  in  any  case,  we  have  learnt  in  our 
day  to  arrange  our  literary  effects  carefully,  and  the 
only  point  in  which  we  fall  short  of  Scott  is  in  the 
incidental  misfortune  that  we  have  nothing  particular 
to  arrange. 

[159] 


VARIED    TYPES 

It  is  said  that  Scott  is  neglected  by  modern  read- 
ers; if  so,  the  matter  could  be  more  appropriately 
described  by  saying  that  modern  readers  are  neg- 
lected by  Providence.  The  ground  of  this  neglect,  in 
so  far  as  it  exists,  must  be  found,  I  suppose,  in  the 
general  sentiment  that,  like  the  beard  of  Polonius,  he 
is  too  long.  Yet  it  is  surely  a  peculiar  thing  that 
in  literature  alone  a  house  should  be  despised  because 
it  is  too  large,  or  a  host  impugned  because  he  is  too 
generous.  If  romance  be  really  a  pleasure,  it  is  diffi- 
cult to  understand  the  modern  reader's  consuming 
desire  to  get  it  over,  and  if  it  be  not  a  pleasure,  it  is 
difficult  to  understand  his  desire  to  have  it  at  all. 
Mere  size,  it  seems  to  me,  cannot  be  a  fault.  The 
fault  must  lie  in  some  disproportion.  If  some  of 
Scott's  stories  are  dull  and  dilatory,  it  is  not  because 
they  are  giants,  but  because  they  are  hunchbacks  or 
cripples.  Scott  was  very  far  indeed  from  being  a 
perfect  writer,  but  I  do  not  think  that  it  can  be  shown 
that  the  large  and  elaborate  plan  on  which  his  stories 
are  built  was  by  any  means  an  imperfection.  He  ar- 
[160] 


SIR    WALTER    SCOTT 

ranged  his  endless  prefaces  and  his  colossal  introduc- 
tions just  as  an  architect  plans  great  gates  and  long 
approaches  to  a  really  large  house.  He  did  not  share 
the  latter-day  desire  to  get  quickly  through  a  story. 
He  enjoyed  narrative  as  a  sensation;  he  did  not  wish 
to  swallow  a  story  like  a  pill,  that  it  should  do  him 
good  afterwards.  He  desired  to  taste  it  like  a  glass 
of  port,  that  it  might  do  him  good  at  the  time.  The 
reader  sits  late  at  his  banquets.  His  characters  have 
that  air  of  immortality  which  belongs  to  those  of 
Dumas  and  Dickens.  We  should  not  be  surprised 
to  meet  them  in  any  number  of  sequels.  Scott,  in  his 
heart  of  hearts,  probably  would  have  liked  to  write 
an  endless  story  without  either  beginning  or  close. 

Walter  Scott  is  a  great,  and,  therefore,  mysterious 
man.  He  will  never  be  understood  until  Romance  is 
understood,  and  that  will  be  only  when  Time,  Man, 
and  Eternity  are  understood.  To  say  that  Scott  had 
more  than  any  other  man  that  ever  lived  a  sense  of  the 
romantic  seems,  in  these  days,  a  slight  and  superficial 
tribute.  The  whole  modern  theory  arises  from  one 
[161] 


VARIED    TYPES 

fundamental  mistake — the  idea  that  romance  is  in 
some  way  a  plaything  with  life,  a  figment,  a  conven- 
tionality, a  thing  upon  the  outside.  No  genuine 
criticism  of  romance  will  ever  arise  until  we  have 
grasped  the  fact  that  romance  lies  not  upon  the  out- 
side of  life,  but  absolutely  in  the  centre  of  it.  The 
centre  of  every  man's  existence  is  a  dream.  Death, 
disease,  insanity,  are  merely  material  accidents,  like 
toothache  or  a  twisted  ankle.  That  these  brutal  forces 
always  besiege  and  often  capture  the  citadel  does  not 
prove  that  they  are  the  citadel.  The  boast  of  the 
realist  (applying  what  the  reviewers  call  his  scalpel) 
is  that  he  cuts  into  the  heart  of  life ;  but  he  makes  a 
very  shallow  incision,  if  he  only  reaches  as  deep  as 
habits  and  calamities  and  sins.  Deeper  than  all  these 
lies  a  man's  vision  of  himself,  as  swaggering  and  senti- 
mental as  a  penny  novelette.  The  literature  of  can- 
dour unearths  innumerable  weaknesses  and  elements 
of  lawlessness  which  is  called  romance.  It  perceives 
superficial  habits  like  murder  and  dipsomania,  but  it 
does  not  perceive  the  deepest  of  sins — the  sin  of  vanity 
[162] 


SIR    WALTER    SCOTT 

— vanity  which  is  the  mother  of  all  day-dreams  and 
adventures,  the  one  sin  that  is  not  shared  with  any 
boon  companion,  or  whispered  to  any  priest. 

In  estimating,  therefore,  the  ground  of  Scott's  pre- 
eminence in  romance  we  must  absolutely  rid  ourselves 
of  the  notion  that  romance  or  adventure  are  merely 
materialistic  things  involved  in  the  tangle  of  a  plot 
or  the  multiplicity  of  drawn  swords.  We  must  remem- 
ber that  it  is,  like  tragedy  or  farce,  a  state  of  the  soul, 
and  that,  for  some  dark  and  elemental  reason  which 
we  can  never  understand,  this  state  of  the  soul  is 
evoked  in  us  by  the  sight  of  certain  places  or  the 
contemplation  of  certain  human  crises,  by  a  stream 
rushing  under  a  heavy  and  covered  wooden  bridge,  or 
by  a  man  plunging  a  knife  or  sword  into  tough 
timber.  In  the  selection  of  these  situations  which 
catch  the  spirit  of  romance  as  in  a  net,  Scott  has  never 
been  equalled  or  even  approached.  His  finest  scenes 
affect  us  like  fragments  of  a  hilarious  dream.  They 
have  the  same  quality  which  is  often  possessed  by  those 
nocturnal  comedies — that  of  seeming  more  human 
[163] 


VARIED    TYPES 

than  our  waking  life — even  while  they  are  less  pos- 
sible. Sir  Arthur  Wardour,  with  his  daughter  and  the 
old  beggar  crouching  in  a  cranny  of  the  cliff  as  night 
falls  and  the  tide  closes  around  them,  are  actually  in 
the  coldest  and  bitterest  of  practical  situations.  Yet 
the  whole  incident  has  a  quality  that  can  only  be  called 
boyish.  It  is  warmed  with  all  the  colours  of  an  in- 
credible sunset.  Rob  Roy  trapped  in  the  Tolbooth, 
and  confronted  with  Bailie  Nicol  Jarvie,  draws  no 
sword,  leaps  from  no  window,  affects  none  of  the 
dazzling  external  acts  upon  which  contemporary  ro- 
mance depends,  yet  that  plain  and  humourous  dialogue 
is  full  of  the  essential  philosophy  of  romance  which  is 
an  almost  equal  betting  upon  man  and  destiny.  Per- 
haps the  most  profoundly  thrilling  of  all  Scott's  situ- 
ations is  that  in  which  the  family  of  Colonel  Manner- 
ing  are  waiting  for  the  carriage  which  may  or  may 
not  arrive  by  night  to  bring  an  unknown  man  into 
a  princely  possession.  Yet  almost  the  whole  of  that 
thrilling  scene  consists  of  a  ridiculous  conversation 
about  food,  and  flirtation  between  a  frivolous  old 
[164] 


SIR    WALTER    SCOTT 

lawyer  and  a  fashionable  girl.  We  can  say  nothing 
about  what  makes  these  scenes,  except  that  the  wind 
bloweth  where  it  listeth,  and  that  here  the  wind  blows 
strong. 

It  is  in  this  quality  of  what  may  be  called  spiritual 
adventurousness  that  Scott  stands  at  so  different  an 
elevation  to  the  whole  of  the  contemporary  crop  of 
romancers  who  have  followed  the  leadership  of  Dumas. 
There  has,  indeed,  been  a  great  and  inspiriting  re- 
vival of  romance  in  our  time,  but  it  is  partly  frustrated 
in  almost  every  case  by  this  rooted  conception  that 
romance  consists  in  the  vast  multiplication  of  incidents 
and  the  violent  acceleration  of  narrative.  The  heroes 
of  Mr.  Stanley  Weyman  scarcely  ever  have  their 
swords  out  of  their  hands ;  the  deeper  presence  of  ro- 
mance is  far  better  felt  when  the  sword  is  at  the  hip 
ready  for  innumerable  adventures  too  terrible  to  be 
pictured.  The  Stanley  Weyman  hero  has  scarcely 
time  to  eat  his  supper  except  in  the  act  of  leaping  from 
a  window  or  whilst  his  other  hand  is  employed  in  lung- 
ing with  a  rapier.  In  Scott's  heroes,  on  the  other 
[165] 


VARIED    TYPES 

hand,  there  is  no  characteristic  so  typical  or  so  worthy 
of  humour  as  their  disposition  to  linger  over  their 
meals.  The  conviviality  of  the  Clerk  of  Copman- 
hurst  or  of  Mr.  Pleydell,  and  the  thoroughly  solid 
things  they  are  described  as  eating,  is  one  of  the  most 
perfect  of  Scott's  poetic  touches.  In  short,  Mr. 
Stanley  Weyman  is  filled  with  the  conviction  that  the 
sole  essence  of  romance  is  to  move  with  insatiable 
rapidity  from  incident  to  incident.  In  the  truer  ro- 
mance of  Scott  there  is  more  of  the  sentiment  of  "  Oh ! 
still  delay,  thou  art  so  fair  " !  more  of  a  certain  patri- 
archal enjoyment  of  things  as  they  are — of  the  sword 
by  the  side  and  the  wine-cup  in  the  hand.  Romance, 
indeed,  does  not  consist  by  any  means  so  much  in  ex- 
periencing adventures  as  in  being  ready  for  them. 
How  little  the  actual  boy  cares  for  incidents  in  com- 
parison to  tools  and  weapons  may  be  tested  by  the 
fact  that  the  most  popular  story  of  adventure  is  con- 
cerned with  a  man  who  lived  for  years  on  a  desert 
island  with  two  guns  and  a  sword,  which  he  never  had 
to  use  on  an  enemy. 

[166] 


SIR    WALTER    SCOTT 

Closely  connected  with  this  is  one  of  the  charges 
most  commonly  brought  against  Scott,  particularly 
in  his  own  day — the  charge  of  a  fanciful  and  mo- 
notonous insistence  upon  the  details  of  armour  and 
costume.  The  critic  in  the  Edinburgh  Review  said  in- 
dignantly that  he  could  tolerate  a  somewhat  detailed 
description  of  the  apparel  of  Marmion,  but  when  it 
came  to  an  equally  detailed  account  of  the  apparel  of 
his  pages  and  yeomen  the  mind  could  bear  it  no  longer. 
The  only  thing  to  be  said  about  that  critic  is  that  he 
had  never  been  a  little  boy.  He  foolishly  imagined 
that  Scott  valued  the  plume  and  dagger  of  Marmion 
for  Marmion's  sake.  Not  being  himself  romantic, 
he  could  not  understand  that  Scott  valued  the  plume 
because  it  was  a  plume,  and  the  dagger  because  it  was 
a  dagger.  Like  a  child,  he  loved  weapons  with  a 
manual  materialistic  love,  as  one  loves  the  softness  of 
fur  or  the  coolness  of  marble.  One  of  the  profound 
philosophical  truths  which  are  almost  confined  to  in- 
fants is  this  love  of  things,  not  for  their  use  or  origin, 
but  for  their  own  inherent  characteristics,  the  child's 
[167] 


VARIED    TYPES 

love  of  the  toughness  of  wood,  the  wetness  of  water, 
the  magnificent  soapiness  of  soap.  So  it  was  with 
Scott,  who  had  so  much  of  the  child  in  him.  Human 
beings  were  perhaps  the  principal  characters  in  his 
stories,  but  they  were  certainly  not  the  only  charac- 
ters. A  battle-axe  was  a  person  of  importance,  a 
castle  had  a  character  and  ways  of  its  own.  A  church 
bell  had  a  word  to  say  in  the  matter.  Like  a  true 
child,  he  almost  ignored  the  distinction  between  the 
animate  and  inanimate.  A  two-handed  sword  might 
be  carried  only  by  a  menial  in  a  procession,  but  it  was 
something  important  and  immeasurably  fascinating 
— it  was  a  two-handed  sword. 

There  is  one  quality  which  is  supreme  and  continu- 
ous in  Scott  which  is  little  appreciated  at  present. 
One  of  the  values  we  have  really  lost  in  recent  fiction 
is  the  value  of  eloquence.  The  modern  literary  artist 
is  compounded  of  almost  every  man  except  the  orator. 
Yet  Shakespeare  and  Scott  are  certainly  alike  in  this, 
that  they  could  both,  if  literature  had  failed,  have 
earned  a  living  as  professional  demagogues.  The 
[168] 


SIR    WALTER    SCOTT 

feudal  heroes  in  the  "  Waverley  Novels  "  retort  upon 
each  other  with  a  passionate  dignity,  haughty  and 
yet  singularly  human,  which  can  hardly  be  paralleled 
in  political  eloquence  except  in  "  Julius  Caesar."  With 
a  certain  fiery  impartiality  which  stirs  the  blood, 
Scott  distributes  his  noble  orations  equally  among 
saints  and  villains.  He  may  deny  a  villain  every  vir- 
tue or  triumph,  but  he  cannot  endure  to  deny  him  a 
telling  word ;  he  will  ruin  a  man,  but  he  will  not  silence 
him.  In  truth,  one  of  Scott's  most  splendid  traits  is 
his  difficulty,  or  rather  incapacity,  for  despising  any 
of  his  characters.  He  did  not  scorn  the  most  revolt- 
ing miscreant  as  the  realist  of  to-day  commonly 
scorns  his  own  hero.  Though  his  soul  may  be  in  rags, 
every  man  of  Scott  can  speak  like  a  king. 

This  quality,  as  I  have  said,  is  sadly  to  seek  in  the 
fiction  of  the  passing  hour.  The  realist  would,  of 
course,  repudiate  the  bare  idea  of  putting  a  bold  and 
brilliant  tongue  in  every  man's  head,  but  even  where 
the  moment  of  the  story  naturally  demands  eloquence 
the  eloquence  seems  frozen  in  the  tap.  Take  any  con- 
[169] 


VARIED    TYPES 

temporary  work  of  fiction  and  turn  to  the  scene  where 
the  young  Socialist  denounces  the  millionaire,  and  then 
compare  the  stilted  sociological  lecture  given  by  that 
self-sacrificing  bore  with  the  surging  joy  of  words 
in  Rob  Roy's  declaration  of  himself,  or  Athelstane's 
defiance  of  De  Bracy.  That  ancient  sea  of  human 
passion  upon  which  high  words  and  great  phrases  are 
the  resplendent  foam  is  just  now  at  a  low  ebb.  We 
have  even  gone  the  length  of  congratulating  ourselves 
because  we  can  see  the  mud  and  the  monsters  at  the 
bottom. 

In  politics  there  is  not  a  single  man  whose  posi- 
tion is  due  to  eloquence  in  the  first  degree ;  its  place 
is  taken  by  repartees  and  rejoinders  purely  intel- 
lectual, like  those  of  an  omnibus  conductor.  In 
discussing  questions  like  the  farm-burning  in  South 
Africa  no  critic  of  the  war  uses  his  material  $&  Burke 
or  Grattan  ( perhaps  exaggeratively )  would  have  used 
it — the  speaker  is  content  with  facts  and  expositions 
of  facts.  In  another  age  he  might  have  risen  and 
hurled  that  great  song  in  prose,  perfect  as  prose  and 
[170] 


SIR    WALTER    SCOTT 

yet  rising  into  a  chant,  which  Meg  Merrilies  hurled 
at  Ellangowan,  at  the  rulers  of  Britain :  "  Ride  your 
ways,  Laird  of  Ellangowan ;  ride  your  ways,  Godfrey 
Bertram — this  day  have  ye  quenched  seven  smoking 
hearths.  See  if  the  fire  in  your  ain  parlour  burns  the 
blyther  for  that.  Ye  have  riven  the  thack  of  seven 
cottar  houses.  Look  if  your  ain  roof-tree  stands  the 
faster  for  that.  Ye  may  stable  your  stirks  in  the 
sheilings  of  Dern-cleugh.  See  that  the  hare  does  not 
couch  on  the  hearthstane  of  Ellangowan.  Ride  your 
ways,  Godfrey  Bertram." 

The  reason  is,  of  course,  that  these  men  are  afraid 
of  bombast  and  Scott  was  not.  A  man  will  not  reach 
eloquence  if  he  is  afraid  of  bombast,  just  as  a  man  will 
not  jump  a  hedge  if  he  is  afraid  of  a  ditch.  As  the 
object  of  all  eloquence  is  to  find  the  least  common  de- 
nominator of  men's  souls,  to  fall  just  within  the  na- 
tural comprehension,  it  cannot  obviously  have  any 
chance  with  a  literary  ambition  which  aims  at  falling 
just  outside  it.  It  is  quite  right  to  invent  subtle  an- 
alyses and  detached  criticisms,  but  it  is  unreasonable 
[171] 


VARIED   TYPES 

to  expect  them  to  be  punctuated  with  roars  of  popu- 
lar applause.  It  is  possible  to  conceive  of  a  mob 
shouting  any  central  and  simple  sentiment,  good  or 
bad,  but  it  is  impossible  to  think  of  a  mob  shouting 
a  distinction  in  terms.  In  the  matter  of  eloquence, 
the  whole  question  is  one  of  the  immediate  effect  of 
greatness,  such  as  is  produced  even  by  fine  bombast. 
It  is  absurd  to  call  it  merely  superficial ;  here  there  is 
no  question  of  superficiality ;  we  might  as  well  call  a 
stone  that  strikes  us  between  the  eyes  merely  superfi- 
ciaL  The  very  word  u  superficial "  is  founded  on  a 
fundamental  mistake  about  life,  the  idea  that  second 
thoughts  are  best.  The  superficial  impression  of  the 
world  is  by  far  the  deepest.  What  we  really  feel,  nat- 
urally and  casually,  about  the  look  of  skies  and  trees 
and  the  face  of  friends,  that  and  that  alone  will  al- 
most certainly  remain  our  vital  philosophy  to  our 
dying  day. 

Scott's  bombast,  therefore,  will  always  be  stirring  to 
anyone  who  approaches  it,  as  he  should  approach  all 
literature,  as  a  little  child.     We  could  easily  excuse 
[172] 


SIR    WALTER    SCOTT 

the  contemporary  critic  for  not  admiring  melo- 
dramas and  adventure  stories,  and  Punch  and  Judy, 
if  he  would  admit  that  it  was  a  slight  deficiency  in  his 
artistic  sensibilities.  Beyond  all  question,  it  marks  a 
lack  of  literary  instinct  to  be  unable  to  simplify  one's 
mind  at  the  first  signal  of  the  advance  of  romance. 
"  You  do  me  wrong,"  said  Brian  de  Bois-Guilbert 
to  Rebecca.  "  Many  a  law,  many  a  commandment 
have  I  broken,  but  my  word,  never,"  "  Die,"  cries 
Balfour  of  Burley  to  the  villain  in  "  Old  Mortality." 

"  Die,     hoping     nothing,     believing     nothing " 

"  And  fearing  nothing,"  replies  the  other.  This  is 
the  old  and  honourable  fine  art  of  bragging,  as  it  was 
practised  by  the  great  worthies  of  antiquity.  The 
man  who  cannot  appreciate  it  goes  along  with  the 
man  who  cannot  appreciate  beef  or  claret  or  a  game 
with  children  or  a  brass  band.  They  are  afraid  of 
making  fools  of  themselves,  and  are  unaware  that 
that  transformation  has  already  been  triumphantly 
effected. 

Scott  is  separated,  then,  from  much  of  the  later 
[173] 


VARIED    TYPES 

conception  of  fiction  by  this  quality  of  eloquence. 
The  whole  of  the  best  and  finest  work  of  the 
modern  novelist  (such  as  the  work  of  Mr.  Henry 
James)  is  primarily  concerned  with  that  delicate  and 
fascinating  speech  which  burrows  deeper  and  deeper 
like  a  mole ;  but  we  have  wholly  forgotten  that  speech 
which  mounts  higher  and  higher  like  a  wave  and  falls 
in  a  crashing  peroration.  Perhaps  the  most  thor- 
oughly brilliant  and  typical  man  of  this  decade  is  Mr. 
Bernard  Shaw.  In  his  admirable  play  of  "  Can- 
dida" it  is  clearly  a  part  of  the  character  of  the 
Socialist  clergyman  that  he  should  be  eloquent, 
but  he  is  not  eloquent  because  the  whole  "  G.  B.  S." 
condition  of  mind  renders  impossible  that  poetic 
simplicity  which  eloquence  requires.  Scott  takes 
his  heroes  and  villains  seriously,  which  is,  after 
all,  the  way  that  heroes  and  villains  take  them- 
selves— especially  villains.  It  is  the  custom  to  call 
these  old  romantic  poses  artificial;  but  the  word  arti- 
ficial is  the  last  and  silliest  evasion  of  criticism.  There 
was  never  anything  in  the  world  that  was  really  arti- 
[174] 


SIR    WALTER    SCOTT 

ficial.    It  had  some  motive  or  ideal  behind  it,  and  gen- 
erally a  much  better  one  than  we  think. 

Of  the  faults  of  Scott  as  an  artist  it  is  not  very 
necessary  to  speak,  for  faults  are  generally  and 
easily  pointed  out,  while  there  is  yet  no  adequate 
valuation  of  the  varieties  and  contrasts  of  virtue. 
We  have  compiled  a  complete  botanical  classifica- 
tion of  the  weeds  in  the  poetical  garden,  but  the 
flowers  still  flourish,  neglected  and  nameless.  It  is 
true,  for  example,  that  Scott  had  an  incomparably 
stiff  and  pedantic  way  of  dealing  with  his  heroines: 
he  made  a  lively  girl  of  eighteen  refuse  an  offer  in  the 
language  of  Dr.  Johnson.  To  him,  as  to  most  men  of 
his  time,  woman  was  not  an  individual,  but  an  insti- 
tution— a  toast  that  was  drunk  some  time  after  that 
of  Church  and  King.  But  it  is  far  better  to  consider 
the  difference  rather  as  a  special  merit,  in  that  he 
stood  for  all  those  clean  and  bracing  shocks  of  inci- 
dent which  are  untouched  by  passion  or  weakness,  for 
a  certain  breezy  bachelorhood,  which  is  almost  essen- 
tial to  the  literature  of  adventure.  With  all  his  faults, 
[175] 


VARIED    TYPES 

and  all  his  triumphs,  he  stands  for  the  great  mass  of 
natural  manliness  which  must  be  absorbed  into  art 
unless  art  is  to  be  a  mere  luxury  and  freak.  An  appre- 
ciation of  Scott  might  be  made  almost  a  test  of  de- 
cadence. If  ever  we  lose  touch  with  this  one  most  reck- 
less and  defective  writer,  it  will  be  a  proof  to  us  that 
we  have  erected  round  ourselves  a  false  cosmos,  a  world 
of  lying  and  horrible  perfection,  leaving  outside  of  it 
Walter  Scott  and  that  strange  old  world  which  is  as 
confused  and  as  indefensible  and  as  inspiring  and  as 
healthy  as  he. 


[176] 


BRET  HARTE 


BRET   HARTE 


^"  ""^HERE  are  more  than  nine  hundred  and 
ninety-nine  excellent  reasons  which  we  could 
all  have  for  admiring  the  work  of  Bret 
Harte.  But  one  supreme  reason  stands  not  in  a  cer- 
tain general  superiority  to  them  all — a  reason  which 
may  be  stated  in  three  propositions  united  in  a  com- 
mon conclusion :  first,  that  he  was  a  genuine  American ; 
second,  that  he  was  a  genuine  humourist ;  and,  third, 
that  he  was  not  an  American  humourist.  Bret  Harte 
had  his  own  peculiar  humour,  but  it  had  nothing  in 
particular  to  do  with  American  humour.  American 
humour  has  its  own  peculiar  excellence,  but  it  has 
nothing  in  particular  to  do  with  Bret  Harte.  Amer- 
ican humour  is  purely  exaggerative;  Bret  Harte's 
humour  was  sympathetic  and  analytical. 

In  order  fully  to  understand  this,  it  is  necessary 
[179] 


VARIED    TYPES 

to  realise,  genuinely  and  thoroughly,  that  there  is 
such  a  thing  as  an  international  difference  in  humour. 
If  we  take  the  crudest  joke  in  the  world — the  joke,  let 
us  say,  of  a  man  sitting  down  on  his  hat — we  shall 
yet  find  that  all  the  nations  would  differ  in  their  way 
of  treating  it  humourously,  and  that  if  American  hu- 
mour treated  it  at  all,  it  would  be  in  a  purely  Amer- 
ican manner.  For  example,  there  was  a  case  of  an 
orator  in  the  House  of  Commons,  who,  after  denounc- 
ing all  the  public  abuses  he  could  think  of,  did  sit 
down  on  his  hat.  An  Irishman  immediately  rose,  full 
of  the  whole  wealth  of  Irish  humour,  and  said, 
"  Should  I  be  in  order,  Sir,  in  congratulating  the 
honourable  gentleman  on  the  fact  that  when  he  sat 
down  on  his  hat  his  head  was  not  in  it  ?  "  Here  is  a 
glorious  example  of  Irish  humour — the  bull  not  un- 
conscious, not  entirely  conscious,  but  rather  an  idea  so 
absurd  that  even  the  utterer  of  it  can  hardly  realise 
how  abysmally  absurd  it  is.  But  every  other  nation 
would  have  treated  the  idea  in  a  manner  slightly  dif- 
ferent. The  Frenchman's  humour  would  have  been 
[180] 


BRET    HARTE 

logical :  he  would  have  said,  "  The  orator  denounces 
modern  abuses  and  destroys  to  himself  the  top-hat: 
behold  a  good  example ! "  What  the  Scotchman's  hu- 
mour would  have  said  I  am  not  so  certain,  but  it 
would  probably  have  dealt  with  the  serious  advisabil- 
ity of  making  such  speeches  on  top  of  someone  else's 
hat.  But  American  humour  on  such  a  general  theme 
would  be  the  humour  of  exaggeration.  The  Amer- 
ican humourist  would  say  that  the  English  politicians 
so  often  sat  down  on  their  hats  that  the  noise  of  the 
House  of  Commons  was  one  crackle  of  silk.  He  would 
say  that  when  an  important  orator  rose  to  speak  in 
the  House  of  Commons,  long  rows  of  hatters  waited 
outside  the  House  with  note-books  to  take  down  orders 
from  the  participants  in  the  debate.  He  would  say 
that  the  whole  hat  trade  of  London  was  disorganised 
by  the  news  that  a  clever  remark  had  been  made  by 
a  young  M.  P.  on  the  subject  of  the  imports  of 
Jamaica.  In  short,  American  humour,  neither  un- 
f  athomably  absurd  like  the  Irish,  nor  transfiguringly 
lucid  and  appropriate  like  the  French,  nor  sharp  and 
[181] 


VARIED    TYPES 

sensible  and  full  of  realities  of  life  like  the  Scotch,  is 
simply  the  humour  of  imagination.  It  consists  in  pil- 
ing towers  on  towers  and  mountains  on  mountains ;  of 
heaping  a  joke  up  to  the  stars  and  extending  it  to 
the  end  of  the  world. 

With  this  distinctively  American  humour  Bret 
Harte  had  little  or  nothing  in  common.  The  wild, 
sky-breaking  humour  of  America  has  its  fine  qual- 
ities, but  it  must  in  the  nature  of  things  be  deficient 
in  two  qualities,  not  only  of  supreme  importance  to 
life  and  letters,  but  of  supreme  importance  to  humour 
— reverence  and  sympathy.  And  these  two  qualities 
were  knit  into  the  closest  texture  of  Bret  Harte's  hu- 
mour. Everyone  who  has  read  and  enjoyed  Mark 
Twain  as  he  ought  to  be  read  and  enjoyed  will  re- 
member a  very  funny  and  irreverent  story  about  an 
organist  who  was  asked  to  play  appropriate  music  to 
an  address  upon  the  parable  of  the  Prodigal  Son,  and 
who  proceeded  to  play  with  great  spirit,  "  We'll  all 
get  blind  drunk,  when  Johnny  comes  marching  home." 
The  best  way  of  distinguishing  Bret  Harte  from  the 
[182] 


BRET    HARTE 

rest  of  American  humour  is  to  say  that  if  Bret  Harte 
had  described  that  scene,  it  would  in  some  subtle  way 
have  combined  a  sense  of  the  absurdity  of  the  incident 
with  some  sense  of  the  sublimity  and  pathos  of  the 
theme.  You  would  have  felt  that  the  organist's  tune 
was  funny,  but  not  that  the  Prodigal  Son  was  funny. 
But  America  is  under  a  kind  of  despotism  of  humour. 
Everyone  is  afraid  of  humour :  the  meanest  of  human 
nightmares.  Bret  Harte  had,  to  express  the  matter 
briefly  but  more  or  less  essentially,  the  power  of  laugh- 
ing not  only  at  things,  but  also  with  them.  America 
has  laughed  at  things  magnificently,  with  Gargant- 
uan reverberations  of  laughter.  But  she  has  not  even 
begun  to  learn  the  richer  lesson  of  laughing  with 
them. 

The  supreme  proof  of  the  fact  that  Bret  Harte 
had  the  instinct  of  reverence  may  be  found  in  the  fact 
that  he  was  a  really  great  parodist.  This  may  have 
the  appearance  of  being  a  paradox,  but,  as  in  the  case 
of  many  other  paradoxes,  it  is  not  so  important 
whether  it  is  a  paradox  as  whether  it  is  not  obviously 
[183] 


VARIED    TYPES 

true.  Mere  derision,  mere  contempt,  never  produced 
or  could  produce  parody.  A  man  who  simply  despises 
Paderewski  for  having  long  hair  is  not  necessarily 
fitted  to  give  an  admirable  imitation  of  his  particular 
touch  on  the  piano.  If  a  man  wishes  to  parody 
Paderewski's  style  of  execution,  he  must  emphatically 
go  through  one  process  first:  he  must  admire  it,  and 
even  reverence  it.  Bret  Harte  had  a  real  power  of 
imitating  great  authors,  as  in  his  parodies  on  Dumas, 
on  Victor  Hugo,  on  Charlotte  Bronte.  This  means, 
and  can  only  mean,  that  he  had  perceived  the  real 
beauty,  the  real  ambition  of  Dumas  and  Victor  Hugo 
and  Charlotte  Bronte.  To  take  an  example,  Bret 
Harte  has  in  his  imitation  of  Hugo  a  passage  like  this : 
"  M.  Madeline  was,  if  possible,  better  than  M. 
Myriel.  M.  Myriel  was  an  angel.  M.  Madeline  was 
a  good  man."  I  do  not  know  whether  Victor  Hugo 
ever  used  this  antithesis;  but  I  am  certain  that  he 
would  have  used  it  and  thanked  his  stars  if  he  had 
thought  of  it.  This  is  real  parody,  inseparable  from 
admiration.  It  is  the  same  in  the  parody  of  Dumas, 
[184] 


BRET    HARTE 

which  is  arranged  on  the  system  of  "Aramis  killed 
three  of  them.  Porthos  three.  Athos  three."  You 
cannot  write  that  kind  of  thing  unless  you  have  first 
exulted  in  the  arithmetical  ingenuity  of  the  plots  of 
Dumas.  It  is  the  same  in  the  parody  of  Charlotte 
Bronte,  which  opens  with  a  dream  of  a  storm-beaten 
cliff,  containing  jewels  and  pelicans.  Bret  Harte 
could  not  have  written  it  unless  he  had  really  under- 
stood the  triumph  of  the  Brontes,  the  triumph  of  as- 
serting that  great  mysteries  lie  under  the  surface  of 
the  most  sullen  life,  and  that  the  most  real  part  of  a 
man  is  in  his  dreams. 

This  kind  of  parody  is  for  ever  removed  from  the 
purview  of  ordinary  American  humour.  Can  anyone 
imagine  Mark  Twain,  that  admirable  author,  writing 
even  a  tolerable  imitation  of  authors  so  intellectually 
individual  as  Hugo  or  Charlotte  Bronte?  Mark 
Twain  would  yield  to  the  spirit  of  contempt  which 
destroys  parody.  All  those  who  hate  authors  fail  to 
satirise  them,  for  they  always  accuse  them  of  the 
wrong  faults.  The  enemies  of  Thackeray  call  him  a 
[185] 


VARIED    TYPES 

worldling,  instead  of  what  he  was,  a  man  too  ready 
to  believe  in  the  goodness  of  the  unworldly.  The  en- 
emies of  Meredith  call  his  gospel  too  subtle,  instead  of 
what  it  is,  a  gospel,  if  anything,  too  robust.  And  it 
is  this  vulgar  misunderstanding  which  we  find  in  most 
parody — which  we  find  in  all  American  parody — but 
which  we  never  find  in  the  parodies  of  Bret  Harte. 

"The  skies  they  were  ashen  and  sober, 
The  streets  they  were  dirty  and  drear, 
It  was  the  dark  month  of  October, 
In  that  most  immemorial  year. 
Like  the  skies,  I  was  perfectly  sober, 
But  my  thoughts  they  were  palsied  and  aear, 
Yes,  my  thoughts  were  decidedly  queer." 

This  could  only  be  written  by  a  genuine  admirer  of 
Edgar  Allan  Poe,  who  permitted  himself  for  a  moment 
to  see  the  fun  of  the  thing.  Parody  might  indeed  be 
defined  as  the  worshipper's  half -holiday. 

The    same    general    characteristic    of    sympathy 

amounting  to  reverence  marks  Bret  Harte's  humour 

in  his  better-known  class  of  works,  the  short  stories. 

He  does  not  make  his  characters  absurd  in  order  to 

[186] 


BRET    HARTE 

make  them  contemptible :  it  might  almost  be  said  that 
he  makes  them  absurd  in  order  to  make  them  dignified. 
For  example,  the  greatest  creation  of  Bret  Harte, 
greater  even  than  Colonel  Starbottle  (and  how  ter- 
rible it  is  to  speak  of  anyone  greater  than  Colonel 
Starbottle ! )  is  that  unutterable  being  who  goes  by  the 
name  of  Yuba  Bill.  He  is,  of  course,  the  coach-driver 
in  the  Bret  Harte  district.  Some  ingenious  person, 
whose  remarks  I  read  the  other  day,  had  compared 
him  on  this  ground  with  old  Mr.  Weller.  It  would  be 
difficult  to  find  a  comparison  indicating  a  more  com- 
pletely futile  instinct  for  literature.  Tony  Weller 
and  Yuba  Bill  were  both  coach-drivers,  and  this  fact 
establishes  a  resemblance  just  about  as  much  as  the 
fact  that  Jobson  in  "  Rob  Roy  "  and  George  War- 
rington  in  "  Pendennis  "  were  both  lawyers ;  or  that 
Antonio  and  Mr.  Pickwick  were  both  merchants;  or 
that  Sir  Galahad  and  Sir  Willoughby  Patten  were 
both  knights.  Tony  Weller  is  a  magnificent  gro- 
tesque. He  is  a  gargoyle,  and  his  mouth,  like  the 
mouths  of  so  many  gargoyles,  is  always  open.  He  is 
[187] 


VARIED    TYPES 

garrulous,  exuberant,  flowery,  preposterously  so- 
ciable. He  holds  that  great  creed  of  the  convivial,  the 
creed  which  is  at  the  back  of  so  much  that  is  greatest 
in  Dickens,  the  creed  that  eternity  begins  at  ten 
o'clock  at  night,  and  that  nights  last  forever.  But 
Yuba  Bill  is  a  figure  of  a  widely  different  character. 
He  is  not  convivial;  it  might  almost  be  said  that  he 
is  too  great  ever  to  be  sociable.  A  circle  of  quiescence 
and  solitude  such  as  that  which  might  ring  a  saint 
or  a  hermit  rings  this  majestic  and  profound  humour- 
ist. His  jokes  do  not  flow  upon  him  like  those  of  Mr. 
Weller,  sparkling,  continual,  and  deliberate,  like  the 
play  of  a  fountain  in  a  pleasure  garden ;  they  fall  sud- 
denly and  capriciously,  like  a  crash  of  avalanches 
from  a  great  mountain.  Tony  Weller  has  the  noisy 
humour  of  London,  Yuba  Bill  has  the  silent  humour 
of  the  earth. 

One  of  the  worst  of  the  disadvantages  of  the  rich 

and  random  fertility  of  Bret  Harte  is  the  fact  that  it 

is  very  difficult  to  trace  or  recover  all  the  stories  that 

he  has  written.    I  have  not  within  reach  at  the  moment 

[188] 


BRET    HAUTE 

the  story  in  which  the  character  of  Yuba  Bill  is  ex- 
hibited in  its  most  solemn  grandeur,  but  I  remember 
that  it  concerned  a  ride  on  the  San  Francisco  stage 
coach,  a  difficulty  arising  from  storm  and  darkness, 
and  an  intelligent  young  man  who  suggested  to  Yuba 
Bill  that  a  certain  manner  of  driving  the  coach  in  a 
certain  direction  might  minimise  the  dangers  of  the 
journey.  A  profound  silence  followed  the  intelligent 
young  man's  suggestion,  and  then  (I  quote  from 
memory)  Yuba  Bill  observed  at  last: 

"  Air  you  settin'  any  value  on  that  remark  ?  " 

The  young  man  professed  not  fully  to  comprehend 
him,  and  Yuba  Bill  continued  reflectively: 

"  'Cos  there's  a  comic  paper  in  'Frisco  pays  for 
them  things,  and  I've  seen  worse  in  it." 

To  be  rebuked  thus  is  like  being  rebuked  by  the 
Pyramids  or  by  the  starry  heavens.  There  is  about 
Yuba  Bill  this  air  of  a  pugnacious  calm,  a  stepping 
back  to  get  his  distance  for  a  shattering  blow,  which 
is  like  that  of  Dr.  Johnson  at  his  best.  And  the  effect 
is  inexpressively  increased  by  the  background  and 
[189] 


VARIED    TYPES 

the  whole  picture  which  Bret  Harte  paints  so  power- 
fully ;  the  stormy  skies,  the  sombre  gorge,  the  rocking 
and  spinning  coach,  and  high  above  the  feverish  pass- 
engers the  huge  dark  form  of  Yuba  Bill,  a  silent 
mountain  of  humour. 

Another  unrecovered  and  possibly  irrecoverable 
fragment  about  Yuba  Bill,  I  recall  in  a  story  about 
his  visiting  a  lad  who  had  once  been  his  protege  in  the 
Wild  West,  and  who  had  since  become  a  distinguished 
literary  man  in  Boston.  Yuba  Bill  visits  him,  and  on 
finding  him  in  evening  dress  lifts  up  his  voice  in  a 
superb  lamentation  over  the  tragedy  of  finding  his 
old  friend  at  last  "  a  'otel  waiter."  Then,  vindictively 
pursuing  the  satire,  he  calls  fiercely  to  his  young 
friend,  "  Hi,  Alphonse !  bring  me  a  patty  de  f oy  gras, 
damme."  These  are  the  things  that  make  us  love  the 
eminent  Bill.  He  is  one  of  those  who  achieve  the 
noblest  and  most  difficult  of  all  the  triumphs  of  a  fic- 
titious character — the  triumph  of  giving  us  the  im- 
pression of  having  a  great  deal  more  in  him  than  ap- 
pears between  the  two  boards  of  the  story.  Smaller 
[190] 


BRET    HARTE 

characters  give  us  the  impression  that  the  author  has 
told  the  whole  truth  about  them,  greater  characters 
give  the  impression  that  the  author  has  given  of  them, 
not  the  truth,  but  merely  a  few  hints  and  samples.  In 
some  mysterious  way  we  seem  to  feel  that  even  if 
Shakespeare  was  wrong  about  Falstaff,  Falstaff  ex- 
isted and  was  real;  that  even  if  Dickens  was  wrong 
about  Micawber,  Micawber  existed  and  was  real.  So 
we  feel  that  there  is  in  the  great  salt-sea  of  Yuba 
Bill's  humour  as  good  fish  as  ever  came  out  of  it.  The 
fleeting  jests  which  Yuba  Bill  throws  to  the  coach 
passengers  only  give  us  the  opportunity  of  fancying 
and  deducing  the  vast  mass  of  jests  which  Yuba  Bill 
shares  with  his  creator. 

Bret  Harte  had  to  deal  with  countries  and  com- 
munities of  an  almost  unexampled  laxity,  a  laxity 
passing  the  laxity  of  savages,  the  laxity  of  civilised 
men  grown  savage.  He  dealt  with  a  life  which  we 
in  a  venerable  and  historic  society  may  find  it  some- 
what difficult  to  realise.  It  was  the  life  of  an  entirely 
new  people,  a  people  who,  having  no  certain  past, 
[191] 


VARIED    TYPES 

could  have  no  certain  future.  The  strangest  of  all 
the  sardonic  jests  that  history  has  ever  played  may  be 
found  in  this  fact :  that  there  is  a  city  which  is  of  all 
cities  the  most  typical  of  innovation  and  dissipation, 
and  a  certain  almost  splendid  vulgarity,  and  that  this 
city  bears  the  name  in  a  quaint  old  European  lan- 
guage of  the  most  perfect  exponent  of  the  simplicity 
and  holiness  of  the  Christian  tradition;  the  city  is 
called  San  Francisco.  San  Francisco,  the  capital  of 
the  Bret  Harte  country,  is  a  city  typifying  novelty 
in  a  manner  in  which  it  is  typified  by  few  modern 
localities.  San  Francisco  has  in  all  probability  its 
cathedrals,  but  it  may  well  be  that  its  cathedrals  are 
less  old  and  less  traditional  than  many  of  our  hotels. 
If  its  inhabitants  built  a  temple  to  the  most  primal 
and  forgotten  god  of  whose  worship  we  can  find  a 
trace,  that  temple  would  still  be  a  modern  thing  com- 
pared with  many  taverns  in  Suffolk  round  which  there 
lingers  a  faint  tradition  of  Mr.  Pickwick.  And  every- 
thing in  that  new  gold  country  was  new,  even  to  the 
individual  inhabitants.  Good,  bad,  and  indifferent, 
[192] 


heroes   and   dastards,  they  were  all  men   from  no- 
where. 

Most  of  us  have  come  across  the  practical  problem 
of  London  landladies,  the  problem  of  the  doubtful 
foreign  gentleman  in  a  street  of  respectable  English 
people.  Those  who  have  done  so  can  form  some  idea 
of  what  it  would  be  to  live  in  a  street  full  of  doubtful 
foreign  gentlemen,  in  a  parish,  in  a  city,  in  a  nation 
composed  entirely  of  doubtful  foreign  gentlemen. 
Old  California,  at  the  time  of  the  first  rush  after  gold, 
was  actually  this  paradox  of  the  nation  of  foreigners. 
It  was  a  republic  of  incognitos :  no  one  knew  who  any- 
one else  was,  and  only  the  more  ill-mannered  and  un- 
easy even  desired  to  know.  In  such  a  country  as  this, 
gentlemen  took  more  trouble  to  conceal  their  gentility 
than  thieves  living  in  South  Kensington  would  take 
to  conceal  their  blackguardism.  In  such  a  country 
everyone  is  an  equal,  because  everyone  is  a  stranger. 
In  such  a  country  it  is  not  strange  if  men  in  moral 
matters  feel  something  of  the  irresponsibility  of  a 
dream.  To  plan  plans  which  are  continually  mis- 
[193] 


VARIED    TYPES 

carrying  against  men  who  are  continually  disappear- 
ing by  the  assistance  of  you  know  not  whom,  to  crush 
you  know  not  whom,  this  must  be  a  demoralising  life 
for  any  man ;  it  must  be  beyond  description  demoralis- 
ing for  those  who  have  been  trained  in  no  lofty  or 
orderly  scheme  of  right.  Small  blame  to  them  indeed 
if  they  become  callous  and  supercilious  and  cynical. 
And  the  great  glory  and  achievement  of  Bret  Harte 
consists  in  this,  that  he  realised  that  they  do  not  be- 
come callous,  supercilious,  and  cynical,  but  that  they 
do  become  sentimental  and  romantic,  and  profoundly 
affectionate.  He  discovered  the  intense  sensibility  of 
the  primitive  man.  To  him  we  owe  the  realisation  of 
the  fact  that  while  modern  barbarians  of  genius  like 
Mr.  Henley,  and  in  his  weaker  moments  Mr.  Rudyard 
Kipling,  delight  in  describing  the  coarseness  and  crude 
cynicism  and  fierce  humour  of  the  unlettered  classes, 
the  unlettered  classes  are  in  reality  highly  sentimental 
and  religious,  and  not  in  the  least  like  the  creations  of 
Mr.  Henley  and  Mr.  Kipling.  Bret  Harte  tells  the 
truth  about  the  wildest,  the  grossest,  the  most  rapa- 


BRET    HARTE 

cious  of  all  the  districts  of  the  earth — the  truth  that, 
while  it  is  very  rare  indeed  in  the  world  to  find  a  thor- 
oughly good  man,  it  is  rarer  still,  rare  to  the  point 
of  monstrosity,  to  find  a  man  who  does  not  either  desire 
to  be  one,  or  imagine  that  he  is  one  already. 


[195] 


ALFRED  THE  GREAT 


1 


ALFRED  THE  GREAT 

celebrations  in  connection  with  the 
millenary  of  King  Alfred  struck  a  note 
of  sympathy  in  the  midst  of  much  that 
was  unsympathetic,  because,  altogether  apart  from 
any  peculiar  historical  opinions,  all  men  feel  the  sanc- 
tifying character  of  that  which  is  at  once  strong  and 
remote ;  the  ancient  thing  is  always  the  most  homely, 
and  the  distant  thing  the  most  near.  The  only  pos- 
sible peacemaker  is  a  dead  man,  ever  since  by  the 
sublime  religious  story  a  dead  man  only  could  recon- 
cile heaven  and  earth.  In  a  certain  sense  we  always 
feel  the  past  ages  as  human,  and  our  own  age  as 
strangely  and  even  weirdly  dehumanised.  In  our 
own  time  the  details  overpower  us;  men's  badges  and 
buttons  seem  to  grow  larger  and  larger  as  in  a  horrible 
dream.  To  study  humanity  in  the  present  is  like 
[199] 


VARIED    TYPES 

studying  a  mountain  with  a  magnifying  glass ;  to 
study  it  in  the  past  is  like  studying  it  through  a  tele- 
scope. 

For  this  reason  England,  like  every  other  great  and 
historic  nation,  has  sought  its  typical  hero  in  remote 
and  ill-recorded  times.  The  personal  and  moral  great- 
ness of  Alfred  is,  indeed,  beyond  question.  It  does  not 
depend  any  more  than  the  greatness  of  any  other 
human  hero  upon  the  accuracy  of  any  or  all  of  the 
stories  that  are  told  about  him.  Alfred  may  not  have 
done  one  of  the  things  which  are  reported  of  him.  but 
it  is  immeasurably  easier  to  do  every  one  of  those 
things  than  to  be  the  man  of  whom  such  things  are  re- 
ported falsely.  Fable  is,  generally  speaking,  far  more 
accurate  than  fact,  for  fable  describes  a  man  as  he  was 
to  his  own  age,  fact  describes  him  as  he  is  to  a  handful 
of  inconsiderable  antiquarians  many  centuries  after. 
Whether  Alfred  watched  the  cakes  for  the  neat-herd's 
wife,  whether  he  sang  songs  in  the  Danish  camp,  is 
of  no  interest  to  anyone  except  those  who  set  out  to 
prove  under  considerable  disadvantages  that  they  are 
[200] 


ALFRED    THE    GREAT 

genealogically  descended  from  him.  But  the  man  is 
better  pictured  in  these  stories  than  in  any  number 
of  modern  realistic  trivialities  about  his  favourite 
breakfast  and  his  favourite  musical  composer.  Fable 
is  more  historical  than  fact,  because  fact  tells  us  about 
one  man  and  fable  tells  us  about  a  million  men.  If 
we  read  of  a  man  who  could  make  green  grass  red  and 
turn  the  sun  into  the  moon,  we  may  not  believe  these 
particular  details  about  him,  but  we  learn  something 
infinitely  more  important  than  such  trivialities,  the 
fact  that  men  could  look  into  his  face  and  believe  it 
possible.  The  glory  and  greatness  of  Alfred,  there- 
fore, is  like  that  of  all  the  heroes  of  the  morning  of 
the  world,  set  far  beyond  the  chance  of  that  strange 
and  sudden  dethronement  which  may  arise  from  the 
unsealing  of  a  manuscript  or  the  turning  over  of  a 
stone.  Men  may  have  told  lies  when  they  said  that  he 
first  entrapped  the  Danes  with  his  song  and  then  over- 
came them  with  his  armies,  but  we  know  very  well  that 
it  is  not  of  us  that  such  lies  are  told.  There  may  be 
myths  clustering  about  each  of  our  personalities ;  local 
[201] 


VARIED    TYPES 

saga-men  and  chroniclers  have  very  likely  circulated 
the  story  that  we  are  addicted  to  drink,  or  that  we 
ferociously  ill-use  our  wives.  But  they  do  not  com- 
monly lie  to  the  effect  that  we  have  shed  our  blood  to 
save  all  the  inhabitants  of  the  street.  A  story  grows 
easily,  but  a  heroic  story  is  not  a  very  easy  thing  to 
evoke.  Wherever  that  exists  we  may  be  pretty 
certain  that  we  are  in  the  presence  of  a  dark  but  power- 
ful historic  personality.  We  are  in  the  presence  of 
a  thousand  lies  all  pointing  with  their  fantastic  fingers 
to  one  undiscovered  truth. 

Upon  this  ground  alone  every  encouragement  is  due 
to  the  cult  of  Alfred.  Every  nation  requires  to  have 
behind  it  some  historic  personality,  the  validity  of 
which  is  proved,  as  the  validity  of  a  gun  is  proved, 
by  its  long  range.  It  is  wonderful  and  splendid  that 
we  treasure,  not  the  truth,  but  the  very  gossip  about 
a  man  who  died  a  thousand  years  ago.  We  may  say 
to  him,  as  M.  Rostand  says  to  the  Austrian  Prince: 

"  Dors,  ce  n'est  pas  toujours  la  Legende  qui  merit : 
Une  rfive  est  parfois  moms  trompeur  qu'un  document." 

f  202  ] 


ALFRED    THE    GREAT 

To  have  a  man  so  simple  and  so  honourable  to  repre- 
sent us  in  the  darkness  of  primeval  history,  binds  all 
the  intervening  centuries  together,  and  mollifies  all 
their  monstrosities.  It  makes  all  history  more  com- 
forting and  intelligible ;  it  makes  the  desolate  temple 
of  the  ages  as  human  as  an  inn  parlour. 

But  whether  it  come  through  reliable  facts  or 
through  more  reliable  falsehoods  the  personality  of 
Alfred  has  its  own  unmistakable  colour  and  stature. 
Lord  Rosebery  uttered  a  profound  truth  when  he  said 
that  that  personality  was  peculiarly  English.  The 
great  magnificence  of  the  English  character  is  ex- 
pressed in  the  word  "  service."  There  is,  perhaps,  no 
nation  so  vitally  theocratical  as  the  English ;  no  nation 
in  which  the  strong  men  have  so  consistently  preferred 
the  instrumental  to  the  despotic  attitude,  the  pleasures 
of  the  loyal  to  the  pleasures  of  the  royal  position.  We 
have  had  tyrants  like  Edward  I.  and  Queen  Elizabeth, 
but  even  our  tyrants  have  had  the  worried  and  respon- 
sible air  of  stewards  of  a  great  estate.  Our  typical 
hero  is  such  a  man  as  the  Duke  of  Wellington,  who  had 
[203] 


VARIED    TYPES 

every  kind  of  traditional  and  external  arrogance,  but 
at  the  back  of  all  that  the  strange  humility  which 
made  it  physically  possible  for  him  without  a  gleam  of 
humour  or  discomfort  to  go  on  his  knees  to  a  pre- 
posterous bounder  like  George  IV.  Across  the  infinite 
wastes  of  time  and  through  all  the  mists  of  legend  we 
still  feel  the  presence  in  Alfred  of  this  strange  and 
unconscious  self-effacement.  After  the  fullest  esti- 
mate of  our  misdeeds  we  can  still  say  that  our  very 
despots  have  been  less  self-assertive  than  many  pop- 
ular patriots.  As  we  consider  these  things  we  grow 
more  and  more  impatient  of  any  modern  tendencies 
towards  the  enthronement  of  a  more  self-conscious  and 
theatrical  ideal.  Lord  Rosebery  called  up  before  our 
imaginations  the  picture  of  what  Alfred  would  have 
thought  of  the  vast  modern  developments  of  his  nation, 
its  immense  fleet,  its  widespread  Empire,  its  enormous 
contribution  to  the  mechanical  civilisation  of  the  world. 
It  cannot  be  anything  but  profitable  to  conceive  Alfred 
as  full  of  astonishment  and  admiration  at  these  things ; 
it  cannot  be  anything  but  good  for  us  that  we  should 


ALFRED    THE    GREAT 

realise  that  to  the  childlike  eyes  of  a  great  man  of 
old  time  our  inventions  and  appliances  have  not  the 
vulgarity  and  ugliness  that  we  see  in  them.  To 
Alfred  a  steamboat  would  be  a  new  and  sensational 
sea-dragon,  and  the  penny  postage  a  miracle  achieved 
by  the  despotism  of  a  demi-god. 

But  when  we  have  realised  all  this  there  is  some- 
thing more  to  be  said  in  connection  with  Lord  Rose- 
bery's  vision.  What  would  King  Alfred  have  said  if 
he  had  been  asked  to  expend  the  money  which  he  de- 
voted to  the  health  and  education  of  his  people  upon 
a  struggle  with  some  race  of  Visigoths  or  Parthians 
inhabiting  a  small  section  of  a  distant  continent? 
What  would  he  have  said  if  he  had  known  that  that 
science  of  letters  which  he  taught  to  England  would 
eventually  be  used  not  to  spread  truth,  but  to  drug 
the  people  with  political  assurances  as  imbecile  in 
themselves  as  the  assurance  that  fire  does  not  burn  and 
water  does  not  drown?  What  would  he  have  said  if 
the  same  people  who,  in  obedience  to  that  ideal  of 
service  and  sanity  of  which  he  was  the  example,  had 
[205] 


VARIED    TYPES 

borne  every  privation  in  order  to  defeat  Napoleon, 
should  come  at  last  to  find  no  better  compliment  to  one 
of  their  heroes  than  to  call  him  the  Napoleon  of  South 
Africa?  What  would  he  have  said  if  that  nation  for 
which  he  had  inaugurated  a  long  line  of  incomparable 
men  of  principle  should  forget  all  its  traditions  and 
coquette  with  the  immoral  mysticism  of  the  man  of 
destiny  ? 

Let  us  follow  these  things  by  all  means  if  we  find 
them  good,  and  can  see  nothing  better.  But  to  pre- 
tend that  Alfred  would  have  admired  them  is  like  pre- 
tending that  St.  Dominic  would  have  seen  eye  to  eye 
with  Mr.  Bradlaugh,  or  that  Fra  Angelico  would  have 
revelled  in  the  posters  of  Mr.  Aubrey  Beardsley.  Let 
us  follow  them  if  we  will,  but  let  us  take  honestly  all 
the  disadvantages  of  our  change;  in  the  wildest  mo- 
ment of  triumph  let  us  feel  the  shadow  upon  our 
glories  of  the  shame  of  the  great  king. 


[  206  ] 


MAETERLINCK 


MAETERLINCK 


1 


"^  HE  selection  of  "  Thoughts  from  Maeter- 
linck "  is  a  very  creditable  and  also  a  very 
useful  compilation.  Many  modern  critics 
object  to  the  hacking  and  hewing  of  a  consistent 
writer  which  is  necessary  for  this  kind  of  work,  but 
upon  more  serious  consideration,  the  view  is  not  alto- 
gether adequate.  Maeterlinck  is  a  very  great  man; 
and  in  the  long  run  this  process  of  mutilation  has 
happened  to  all  great  men.  It  was  the  mark  of  a 
great  patriot  to  be  drawn  and  quartered  and  his  head 
set  on  one  spike  in  one  city  and  his  left  leg  on  an- 
other spike  in  another  city.  It  was  the  mark  of  a 
saint  that  even  these  fragments  began  to  work 
miracles.  So  it  has  been  with  all  the  very  great  men 
of  the  world.  However  careless,  however  botchy,  may 
be  the  version  of  Maeterlinck  or  of  anyone  else  given 
[209] 


VARIED    TYPES 

in  such  a  selection  as  this,  it  is  assuredly  far  less  care- 
less and  far  less  botchy  than  the  version,  the  parody, 
the  wild  misrepresentation  of  Maeterlinck  which 
future  ages  will  hear  and  distant  critics  be  called  upon 
to  consider. 

No  one  can  feel  any  reasonable  doubt  that  we  have 
heard  about  Christ  and  Socrates  and  Buddha  and  St. 
Francis  a  mere  chaos  of  excerpts,  a  mere  book  of 
quotations.  But  from  those  fragmentary  epigrams 
we  can  deduce  greatness  as  clearly  as  we  can  deduce 
Venus  from  the  torso  of  Venus  or  Hercules  ex  pede 
Hercvlem.  If  we  knew  nothing  else  about  the 
Founder  of  Christianity,  for  example,  beyond  the  fact 
that  a  religious  teacher  lived  in  a  remote  country,  and 
in  the  course  of  his  peregrinations  and  proclamations 
consistently  called  Himself  "  the  Son  of  Man,"  we 
should  know  by  that  alone  that  he  was  a  man  of  almost 
immeasurable  greatness.  If  future  ages  happened 
to  record  nothing  else  about  Socrates  except  that  he 
owned  his  title  to  be  the  wisest  of  men  because  he  knew 
that  he  knew  nothing,  they  would  be  able  to  deduce 
[210] 


MAETERLINCK 

from  that  the  height  and  energy  of  his  civilisation. 
the  glory  that  was  Greece.  The  credit  of  such  ran- 
dom compilations  as  that  which  "E.  S.  S."  and  Mr. 
George  Allen  have  just  effected  is  quite  secure.  It 
is  the  pure,  pedantic,  literal  editions,  the  complete 
works  of  this  author  or  that  author  which  are  for- 
gotten. It  is  such  books  as  this  that  have  revolu- 
tionised the  destiny  of  the  world.  Great  things  like 
Christianity  or  Platonism  have  never  been  founded 
upon  consistent  editions;  all  of  them  have  been 
founded  upon  scrap-books. 

The  position  of  Maeterlinck  in  modern  life  is  a 
thing  too  obvious  to  be  easily  determined  in  words. 
It  is,  perhaps,  best  expressed  by  saying  that  it  is  the 
great  glorification  of  the  inside  of  things  at  the  ex- 
pense of  the  outside.  There  is  one  great  evil  in 
modern  life  for  which  nobody  has  found  even  approxi- 
mately a  tolerable  description:  I  can  only  invent  a 
word  and  call  it  "  remotism."  It  is  the  tendency  to 
think  first  of  things  which,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  fie 
far  away  from  the  actual  centre  of  human  experience. 
[211] 


VARIED    TYPES 

Thus  people  say,  "  All  our  knowledge  of  life  begins 
with  the  amoeba."  It  is  false ;  our  knowledge  of  life 
begins  with  ourselves.  Thus  they  say  that  the  British 
Empire  is  glorious,  and  at  the  very  word  Empire  they 
think  at  once  of  Australia  and  New  Zealand,  and  Can 
ada,  and  Polar  bears,  and  parrots  and  kangaroos,  and 
it  never  occurs  to  any  one  of  them  to  think  of  the 
Surrey  Hills.  The  one  real  struggle  in  modern  life 
is  the  struggle  between  the  man  like  Maeterlinck,  who 
sees  the  inside  as  the  truth,  and  the  man  like  Zola,  who 
sees  the  outside  as  the  truth.  A  hundred  cases  might 
be  given.  We  may  take,  for  the  sake  of  argument, 
the  case  of  what  is  called  falling  in  love.  The  sincere 
realist,  the  man  who  believes  in  a  certain  finality  in 
physical  science,  says,  "  You  may,  if  you  like,  describe 
this  thing  as  a  divine  and  sacred  and  incredible  vision ; 
that  is  your  sentimental  theory  about  it.  But  what 
it  is,  is  an  animal  and  sexual  instinct  designed  for 
certain  natural  purposes."  The  man  on  the  other 
side,  the  idealist,  replies,  with  quite  equal  confidence, 
that  this  is  the  very  reverse  of  the  truth.  I  pat  it 
[212] 


MAETERLINCK 

as  it  has  always  struck  me ;  he  replies,  **  Not  at  all. 
You  may,  if  yon  like,  describe  this  thing  as  an  animal 
and  sexual  instinct,  designed  for  certain  natural  pur- 
poses ;  that  is  your  philosophical  or  zoological  theory 
about  it.  What  it  is,  beyond  all  doubt  of  any  kind, 
is  a  divine  and  sacred  and  incredible  vision."  The 
fact  that  it  is  an  animal  necessity  only  comes  to  the 
naturalistic  philosopher  after  looking  abroad,  study- 
ing its  origins  and  results,  constructing  an  explana- 
tion of  its  existence,  more  or  less  natural  and  conclu- 
sive. The  fact  that  it  is  a  spiritual  triumph  comes 
to  the  first  errand  boy  who  happens  to  feel  it.  If  a 
lad  of  seventeen  falls  in  love  and  is  struck  dead  by  a 
hansom  cab  an  hour  afterwards,  he  has  known  the 
thing  as  it  is,  a  spiritual  ecstasy;  he  has  never  come 
to  trouble  about  the  thing  as  it  may  be,  a  physical 
destiny.  If  anyone  says  that  falling  in  love  is  an 
animal  thing,  the  answer  is  very  simple.  The  only 
way  of  testing  the  matter  is  to  ask  those  who  are  ex- 
periencing it,  and  none  of  those  would  admit  for  * 
moment  that  it  was  an  animal  thing. 
[813] 


VARIED    TYPES 

Maeterlinck's  appearance  in  Europe  means  prima- 
rily this  subjective  intensity;  by  this  the  materialism 
is  not  overthrown:  materialism  is  undermined.  He 
brings,  not  something  which  is  more  poetic  than 
realism,  not  something  which  is  more  spiritual  than 
realism,  not  something  which  is  more  right  than 
realism,  but  something  which  is  more  real  than  realism. 
He  discovers  the  one  indestructible  thing.  This 
material  world  on  which  such  vast  systems  have  been 
superimposed — this  may  mean  anything.  It  may  be  a 
dream,  it  may  be  a  joke,  it  may  be  a  trap  or  tempta- 
tion, it  may  be  a  charade,  it  may  be  the  beatific 
vision:  the  only  thing  of  which  we  are  certain  is  this 
human  soul.  This  human  soul  finds  itself  alone  in 
a  terrible  world,  afraid  of  the  grass.  It  has  brought 
forth  poetry  and  religion  in  order  to  explain  matters ; 
it  will  bring  them  forth  again.  It  matters  not  one 
atom  how  often  the  lulls  of  materialism  and  scepti- 
cism occur ;  they  are  always  broken  by  the  reappear- 
ance of  a  fanatic.  They  have  come  in  our  time :  they 
have  been  broken  by  Maeterlinck. 


RUSKIN 


RUSKIN  * 

I  DO  not  think  anyone  could  find  any  fault  with 
the  way  in  which  Mr.  Collingwood  has  dis- 
charged his  task,  except,  of  course,  Mr.  Ruskin 
himself,  who  would  certainly  have  scored  through  all 
the  eulogies  in  passionate  red  ink  and  declared  that 
his  dear  friend  had  selected  for  admiration  the  very 
parts  of  his  work  which  were  vile,  brainless,  and  re- 
volting. That,  however,  was  merely  Ruskin's  hu- 
mour, and  one  of  the  deepest  disappointments  with 
Mr.  Collingwood  is  that  he,  like  everyone  else,  fails 
to  appreciate  Ruskin  as  a  humourist.  Yet  he  was 
a  great  humourist:  half  the  explosions  which  are 
solemnly  scolded  as  "  one-sided  "  were  simply  meant 
to  be  one-sided,  were  mere  laughing  experiments  in 
language.  Like  a  woman,  he  saw  the  humour  of  his 

*"The  Life  of  John  Ruskin."     By  W.   G.   Collingwood. 
London:    Methuen. 

[217] 


VARIED    TYPES 

own  prejudices,  did  not  sophisticate  them  by  logic,  but 
deliberately  exaggerated  them  by  rhetoric.  One 
tenth  of  his  paradoxes  would  have  made  the  fortune 
of  a  modern  young  man  with  gloves  of  an  art  yellow. 
He  was  as  fond  of  nonsense  as  Mr.  Max  Beerbohm. 
Only  ....  he  was  fond  of  other  things  too. 
He  did  not  ask  humanity  to  dine  on  pickles. 

But  while  his  kaleidoscope  of  fancy  and  epigram 
gives  him  some  kinship  with  the  present  day,  he  was 
essentially  of  an  earlier  type:  he  was  the  last  of  the 
prophets.  With  him  vanishes  the  secret  of  that  early 
Victorian  simplicity  which  gave  a  man  the  courage  to 
mount  a  pulpit  above  the  head  of  his  fellows.  Many 
elements,  good  and  bad,  have  destroyed  it ;  humility  as 
well  as  fear,  camaraderie  as  well  as  scepticism,  have 
bred  in  us  a  desire  to  give  our  advice  lightly  and  per- 
suasively, to  mask  our  morality,  to  whisper  a  word 
and  glide  away.  The  contrast  was  in  some  degree 
typified  in  the  House  of  Commons  under  the  last 
leadership  of  Mr.  Gladstone:  the  old  order  with  its 
fist  on  the  box,  and  the  new  order  with  its  feet  on  the 
[218] 


RUSKIN 

table.  Doubtless  the  wine  of  that  prophecy  was  too 
strong  even  for  the  strong  heads  that  carried  it.  It 
made  Ruskin  capricious  and  despotic,  Tennyson 
lonely  and  whimsical,  Carlyle  harsh  to  the  point  of 
hatred,  and  Kingsley  often  rabid  to  the  ruin  of  logic 
and  charity.  One  alone  of  that  race  of  giants,  the 
greatest  and  most  neglected,  was  sober  after  the  cup. 
No  mission,  no  frustration  could  touch  with  hysteria 
the  humanity  of  Robert  Browning. 

But  though  Ruskin  seems  to  close  the  roll  of  the 
militant  prophets,  we  feel  how  needful  are  such  figures 
when  we  consider  with  what  pathetic  eagerness  men 
pay  prophetic  honours  even  to  those  who  disclaim  the 
prophetic  character.  Ibsen  declares  that  he  only  de- 
picts life,  that  as  far  as  he  is  concerned  there  is  nothing 
to  be  done,  and  still  armies  of  "  Ibsenites  "  rally  to 
the  flag  and  enthusiastically  do  nothing.  I  have 
found  traces  of  a  school  which  avowedly  follows  Mr. 
Henry  James:  an  idea  full  of  humour.  I  like  to 
think  of  a  crowd  with  pikes  and  torches  shouting  pas- 
sages from  "  The  Awkward  Age."  It  is  right  and 
[219] 


VARIED    TYPES 

proper  for  a  multitude  to  declare  its  readiness  to  follow 
a  prophet  to  the  end  of  the  world,  but  if  he  himself 
explains,  with  pathetic  gesticulations,  that  he  is  only 
going  for  a  walk  in  the  park,  there  is  not  much  for 
the  multitude  to  do.  But  the  disciple  of  Ruskin  had 
plenty  to  do.  He  made  roads ;  in  his  spare  moments 
he  studied  the  whole  of  geology  and  botany.  He 
lifted  up  paving  stones  and  got  down  into  early  Flor- 
entine cellars,  where,  by  hanging  upside  down,  he 
could  catch  a  glimpse  of  a  Cimabue  unpraisable  but 
by  divine  silence.  He  rushed  from  one  end  of  a  city 
to  the  other  comparing  ceilings.  His  limbs  were 
weary,  his  clothes  were  torn,  and  in  his  eyes  was  that 
unfathomable  joy  of  life  which  man  will  never  know 
again  until  once  more  he  takes  himself  seriously. 

Mr.  Collingwood's  excellent  chapters  on  the  art 
criticism  of  Ruskin  would  be  better,  in  my  opinion, 
if  they  showed  more  consciousness  of  the  after  revolu- 
tions that  have  reversed,  at  least  in  detail,  much  of 
Ruskin's  teaching.  We  no  longer  think  that  art 
became  valueless  when  it  was  first  corrupted  with 
[220] 


RUSKIN 

anatomical  accuracy.  But  if  we  return  to  that 
Raphaelism  to  which  he  was  so  unjust,  let  us  not  fall 
into  the  old  error  of  intelligent  reactionaries,  that  of 
ignoring  our  own  debt  to  revolutions.  Ruskin  could 
not  destroy  the  market  of  Raphaelism,  but  he  could 
and  did  destroy  its  monopoly.  We  may  go  back  to 
the  Renaissance,  but  let  us  remember  that  we  go  back 
free.  We  can  picnic  now  in  the  ruins  of  our  dungeon 
and  deride  our  deliverer. 

But  neither  in  Mr.  Collingwood's  book  nor  in  Rus- 
kin's  own  delightful  "  Praeterita  "  shall  we  ever  get  to 
the  heart  of  the  matter.  The  work  of  Ruskin  and 
his  peers  remains  incomprehensible  by  the  very  com- 
pleteness of  their  victory.  Fallen  forever  is  that  vast 
brick  temple  of  Utilitarianism,  of  which  we  may  find 
the  fragments  but  never  renew  the  spell.  Liberal 
Unionists  howl  in  its  high  places,  and  in  its  ruins  Mr. 
Lecky  builds  his  nest.  Its  records  read  with  some- 
thing of  the  mysterious  arrogance  of  Chinese :  hardly 
a  generation  away  from  us,  we  read  of  a  race  who 
believed  in  the  present  with  the  same  sort  of  servile 
[221] 


VARIED    TYPES 

optimism  with  which  the  Oriental  believes  in  the  past. 
It  may  be  that  banging  his  head  against  that  roof 
for  twenty  years  did  not  improve  the  temper  of  the 
prophet.  But  he  made  what  he  praised  in  the  old 
Italian  pictures — "  an  opening  into  eternity." 


[  222  ] 


QUEEN  VICTORIA 


QUEEN  VICTORIA 

A5TONE  who  possesses  spiritual  or  political 
courage  has  made  up  his  mind  to  a  pros- 
pect of  immutable  mutability;  but  even 
in  a  "  transformation  "  there  is  something  catastro- 
phic in  the  removal  of  the  back  scene.  It  is  a  truism 
to  say  of  the  wise  and  noble  lady  who  is  gone  from 
us  that  we  shall  always  remember  her ;  but  there  is  a 
subtler  and  higher  compliment  still  in  confessing  that 
we  often  forgot  her.  We  forgot  her  as  we  forget 
the  sunshine,  as  we  forget  the  postulates  of  an  argu- 
ment, as  we  commonly  forget  our  own  existence.  Mr. 
Gladstone  is  the  only  figure  whose  loss  prepared  us 
for  such  earthquakes  altering  the  landscape.  But 
Mr.  Gladstone  seemed  a  fixed  and  stationary  object 
in  our  age  for  the  same  reason  that  one  railway  train 
looks  stationary  from  another ;  because  he  and  the  age 
[225] 


VARIED    TYPES 

of  progress  were  both  travelling  at  the  same  impetuous 
rate  of  speed.  In  the  end,  indeed,  it  was  probably 
the  age  that  dropped  behind.  For  a  symbol  of  the 
Queen's  position  we  must  rather  recur  to  the  image 
of  a  stretch  of  scenery,  in  which  she  was  as  a  moun- 
tain so  huge  and  familiar  that  its  disappearance  would 
make  the  landscape  round  our  own  door  seem  like  a 
land  of  strangers.  She  had  an  inspired  genius  for 
the  familiarising  virtues;  her  sympathy  and  sanity 
made  us  feel  at  home  even  in  an  age  of  revolutions. 
That  indestructible  sense  of  security  which  for  good 
and  evil  is  so  typical  of  our  nation,  that  almost  scorn- 
ful optimism  which,  in  the  matter  of  ourselves,  cannot 
take  peril  or  even  decadence  seriously,  reached  by  far 
its  highest  and  healthiest  form  in  the  sense  that  we 
were  watched  over  by  one  so  thoroughly  English  in 
her  silence  and  self-control,  in  her  shrewd  trustfulness 
and  her  brilliant  inaction.  Over  and  above  those 
sublime  laws  of  labour  and  pity  by  which  she  ordered 
her  life,  there  are  a  very  large  number  of  minor  intel- 
lectual matters  in  which  we  might  learn  a  lesson  from 
[226] 


QUEEN    VICTORIA 

the  Queen.  There  is  one  especially  which  is  increas- 
ingly needed  in  an  age  when  moral  claims  become 
complicated  and  hysterical.  That  Queen  Victoria 
was  a  model  of  political  unselfishness  is  well  known; 
it  is  less  often  remarked  that  few  modern  people  have 
an  unselfishness  so  completely  free  from  morbidity, 
so  fully  capable  of  deciding  a  moral  question  without 
exaggerating  its  importance.  No  eminent  person 
of  our  time  has  been  so  utterly  devoid  of  that  disease 
of  self-assertion  which  is  often  rampant  among  the 
unselfish.  She  had  one  most  rare  and  valuable  fac- 
ulty, the  faculty  of  letting  things  pass — Acts  of  Par- 
liament and  other  things.  Her  predecessors,  whether 
honest  men  or  knaves,  were  attacked  every  now  and 
then  with  a  nightmare  of  despotic  responsibility ;  they 
suddenly  conceived  that  it  rested  with  them  to  save 
the  world  and  the  Protestant  Constitution.  Queen 
Victoria  had  far  too  much  faith  in  the  world  to  try 
to  save  it.  She  knew  that  Acts  of  Parliament,  even 
bad  Acts  of  Parliament,  do  not  destroy  nations.  But 
she  knew  that  ignorance,  ill-temper,  tyranny,  and 
[227] 


VARIED    TYPES 

officiousness  do  destroy  nations,  and  not  upon  any 
provocation  would  she  set  an  example  in  these  things. 
We  fancy  that  this  sense  of  proportion,  this  largeness 
and  coolness  of  intellectual  magnanimity  is  the  one 
of  the  thousand  virtues  of  Queen  Victoria  of  which  the 
near  future  will  stand  most  in  need.  We  are  gaining 
many  new  mental  powers,  and  with  them  new  mental 
responsibilities.  In  psychology,  in  sociology,  above 
all  in  education,  we  are  learning  to  do  a  great  many 
clever  things.  Unless  we  are  much  mistaken  the  next 
great  task  will  be  to  learn  not  to  do  them.  If  that 
time  comes,  assuredly  we  cannot  do  better  than  turn 
once  more  to  the  memory  of  the  great  Queen  who  for 
seventy  years  followed  through  every  possible  tangle 
and  distraction  the  fairy  thread  of  common  sense. 

We  are  suffering  just  now  from  an  outbreak  of  the 
imagination  which  exhibits  itself  in  politics  and  the 
most  unlikely  places.  The  German  Emperor,  for 
example,  is  neither  a  tyrant  nor  a  lunatic,  as  used  to 
be  absurdly  represented;  he  is  simply  a  minor  poet; 
and  he  feels  just  as  any  minor  poet  would  feel  if  he 
[228] 


QUEEN    VICTORIA 

found  himself  on  the  throne  of  Barbarossa.  The  re- 
vival of  militarism  and  ecclesiasticism  is  an  invasion 
of  politics  by  the  artistic  sense;  it  is  heraldry  rather 
than  chivalry  that  is  lusted  after.  Amid  all  this 
waving  of  wands  and  flaunting  of  uniforms,  all  this 
hedonistic  desire  to  make  the  most  of  everything,  there 
is  something  altogether  quiet  and  splendid  about  the 
sober  disdain  with  which  this  simple  and  courteous 
lady  in  a  black  dress  left  idle  beside  her  the  sceptre  of 
a  hundred  tyrants.  The  heart  of  the  whole  nation 
warmed  as  it  had  never  warmed  for  centuries  at 
the  thought  of  having  in  their  midst  a  woman  who 
cared  nothing  for  her  rights,  and  nothing  for  those 
fantastic  duties  which  are  more  egotistical  than  rights 
themselves. 

The  work  of  the  Queen  for  progressive  politics  has 
surely  been  greatly  underrated.  She  invented  demo- 
cratic monarchy  as  much  as  James  Watt  invented  the 
steam  engine.  William  IV.,  from  whom  we  think  of 
her  as  inheriting  her  Constitutional  position,  held  in 
fact  a  position  entirely  different  to  that  which  she  now 
[229] 


VARIED    TYPES 

hands  on  to  Edward  VII.  William  IV.  was  a  limited 
monarch ;  that  is  to  say,  he  had  a  definite,  open,  and 
admitted  power  in  politics,  but  it  was  a  limited  power. 
Queen  Victoria  was  not  a  limited  monarch ;  in  the  only 
way  in  which  she  cared  to  be  a  monarch  at  all  she  was 
as  unlimited  as  Haroun  Alraschid.  She  had  unlimited 
willing  obedience,  and  unlimited  social  supremacy. 
To  her  belongs  the  credit  of  inventing  a  new  kind  of 
monarchy;  in  which  the  Crown,  by  relinquishing  the 
whole  of  that  political  and  legal  department  of  life 
which  is  concerned  with  coercion,  regimentation,  and 
punishment,  was  enabled  to  rise  above  it  and  become 
the  symbol  of  the  sweeter  and  purer  relations  of  hu- 
manity, the  social  intercourse  which  leads  and  does  not 
drive.  Too  much  cannot  be  said  for  the  wise  au- 
dacity and  confident  completeness  with  which  the 
Queen  cut  away  all  those  cords  of  political  supremacy 
to  which  her  predecessors  had  clung  madly  as  the  only 
stays  of  the  monarchy.  She  had  her  reward.  For 
while  William  IV.'s  supremacy  may  be  called  a  sur- 
vival, it  is  not  too  much  to  say  that  the  Queen's  su- 
[230] 


QUEEN    VICTORIA 

premacy  might  be  called  a  prophecy.  By  lifting  a 
figure  purely  human  over  the  heads  of  judges  and 
warriors,  we  uttered  in  some  symbolic  fashion  the 
abiding,  if  unreasoning,  hope  which  dwells  in  all 
human  hearts,  that  some  day  we  may  find  a  simpler 
solution  of  the  woes  of  nations  than  the  summons  and 
the  treadmill,  that  we  may  find  in  some  such  influence 
as  the  social  influence  of  a  woman,  what  was  called  in 
the  noble  old  language  of  mediaeval  monarchy,  "  a 
fountain  of  mercy  and  a  fountain  of  honour." 

In  the  universal  reverence  paid  to  the  Queen  there 
was  hardly  anywhere  a  touch  of  snobbishness.  Snob- 
bishness, in  so  far  as  it  went  out  towards  former  sov- 
ereigns, went  out  to  them  as  aristocrats  rather  than  as 
kings,  as  heads  of  that  higher  order  of  men,  who  were 
almost  angels  or  demons  in  their  admitted  superiority  to 
common  lines  of  conduct.  This  kind  of  reverence  was 
always  a  curse :  nothing  can  be  conceived  as  worse  for 
the  mass  of  the  people  than  that  they  should  think  the 
morality  for  which  they  have  to  struggle  an  inferior 
morality,  a  thing  unfitted  for  a  haughtier  class.  But 
[231] 


VARIED    TYPES 

of  this  patrician  element  there  was  hardly  a  trace  in 
the  dignity  of  the  Queen.  Indeed,  the  degree  to  which 
the  middle  and  lower  classes  took  her  troubles  and 
problems  to  their  hearts  was  almost  grotesque  in  its 
familiarity.  No  one  thought  of  the  Queen  as  an  aris- 
tocrat like  the  Duke  of  Devonshire,  or  even  as  a  mem- 
ber of  the  governing  classes  like  Mr.  Chamberlain. 
Men  thought  of  her  as  something  nearer  to  them  even 
in  being  further  off ;  as  one  who  was  a  good  queen,  and 
who  would  have  been,  had  her  fate  demanded,  with 
equal  cheerfulness,  a  good  washerwoman.  Herein  lay 
her  unexampled  triumph,  the  greatest  and  perhaps  the 
last  triumph  of  monarchy.  Monarchy  in  its  health- 
iest days  had  the  same  basis  as  democracy:  the  belief 
in  human  nature  when  entrusted  with  power.  A  king 
was  only  the  first  citizen  who  received  the  fran- 
chise. 

Both  royalty  and  religion  have  been  accused  of  despis- 
ing humanity,  and  in  practice  it  has  been  too  often 
true ;  but  after  all  both  the  conception  of  the  prophet 
and  that  of  the  king  were  formed  by  paying  humanity 
[232] 


QUEEN    VICTORIA 

the  supreme  compliment  of  selecting  from  it  almost 
at  random.  This  daring  idea  that  a  healthy  human 
being,  when  thrilled  by  all  the  trumpets  of  a  great 
trust,  would  rise  to  the  situation,  has  often  been 
tested,  but  never  with  such  complete  success  as  in  the 
case  of  our  dead  Queen.  On  her  was  piled  the  crush- 
ing load  of  a  vast  and  mystical  tradition,  and  she  stood 
up  straight  under  it.  Heralds  proclaimed  her  as  the 
anointed  of  God,  and  it  did  not  seem  presumptuous. 
Brave  men  died  in  thousands  shouting  her  name,  and 
it  did  not  seem  unnatural.  No  mere  intellect,  no  mere 
worldly  success  could,  in  this  age  of  bold  inquiry, 
have  sustained  that  tremendous  claim;  long  ago  we 
should  have  stricken  Caesar  and  dethroned  Napoleon. 
But  these  glories  and  these  sacrifices  did  not  seem  too 
much  to  celebrate  a  hardworking  human  nature ;  they 
were  possible  because  at  the  heart  of  our  Empire  was 
nothing  but  a  defiant  humility.  If  the  Queen  had 
stood  for  any  novel  or  fantastic  imperial  claims,  the 
whole  would  have  seemed  a  nightmare ;  the  whole  was 
successful  because  she  stood,  and  no  one  could  deny 
[233] 


VARIED    TYPES 

that  she  stood,  for  the  humblest,  the  shortest  and  the 
most  indestructible  of  human  gospels,  that  when  all 
troubles  and  troublemongers  have  had  their  say,  our 
work  can  be  done  till  sunset,  our  life  can  be  lived  till 
death. 


[234] 


THE  GERMAN  EMPEROR 


1 


THE  GERMAN   EMPEROR 

[  HE  list  of  the  really  serious,  the  really  con- 
vinced, the  really  important  and  compre- 
hensible people  now  alive  includes,  as  most 
Englishmen  would  now  be  prepared  to  admit,  the  Ger- 
man Emperor.  He  is  a  practical  man  and  a  poet.  I 
do  not  know  whether  there  are  still  people  in  existence 
who  think  there  is  some  kind  of  faint  antithesis  be- 
tween these  two  characters;  but  I  incline  to  think 
there  must  be,  because  of  the  surprise  which  the 
career  of  the  German  Emperor  has  generally  evoked. 
When  he  came  to  the  throne  it  became  at  once  appar- 
ent that  he  was  poetical;  people  assumed  in  conse- 
quence that  he  was  unpractical ;  that  he  would  plunge 
Europe  into  war,  that  he  would  try  to  annex  France, 
that  he  would  say  he  was  the  Emperor  of  Russia,  that 
he  would  stand  on  his  head  in  the  Reichstag,  that  he 
[237] 


VARIED    TYPES 

would  become  a  pirate  on  the  Spanish  Main.  Years 
upon  years  have  passed;  he  has  gone  on  making 
speeches,  he  has  gone  on  talking  about  God  and  his 
sword,  he  has  poured  out  an  ever  increased  rhetoric 
and  sestheticism.  And  yet  all  the  time  people  have 
slowly  and  surely  realised  that  he  knows  what  he  is 
about,  that  he  is  one  of  the  best  friends  of  peace,  that 
his  influence  on  Europe  is  not  only  successful,  but  in 
many  ways  good,  that  he  knows  what  world  he  is 
living  in  better  than  a  score  of  materialists. 

The  explanation  never  comes  to  them — he  is  a  poet ; 
therefore,  a  practical  man.  The  affinity  of  the  two 
words,  merely  as  words,  is  much  nearer  than  many 
people  suppose,  for  the  matter  of  that.  There  is  one 
Greek  word  for  "  I  do  "  from  which  we  get  the  word 
practical,  and  another  Greek  word  for  "  I  do  "  from 
which  we  get  the  word  poet.  I  was  doubtless  once  in- 
formed of  a  profound  difference  between  the  two,  but 
I  have  forgotten  it.  The  two  words  practical  and 
poetical  may  mean  two  subtly  different  things  in  that 
old  and  subtle  language,  but  they  mean  the  same  in 
[238] 


THE    GERMAN    EMPEROR 

English  and  the  same  in  the  long  run.  It  is  ridic- 
ulous to  suppose  that  the  man  who  can  understand 
the  inmost  intricacies  of  a  human  being  who  has  never 
existed  at  all  cannot  make  a  guess  at  the  conduct  of 
man  who  lives  next  door.  It  is  idle  to  say  that  a  man 
who  has  himself  felt  the  mad  longing  under  the  mad 
moon  for  a  vagabond  life  cannot  know  why  his  son 
runs  away  to  sea.  It  is  idle  to  say  that  a  man  who 
has  himself  felt  the  hunger  for  any  kind  of  exhilara- 
tion, from  angel  or  devil,  cannot  know  why  his  butler 
takes  to  drink.  It  is  idle  to  say  that  a  man  who  has 
been  fascinated  with  the  wild  fastidiousness  of  destiny 
does  not  know  why  stockbrokers  gamble,  to  say  that 
a  man  who  has  been  knocked  into  the  middle  of  eternal 
life  by  a  face  in  a  crowd  does  not  know  why  the  poor 
marry  young ;  that  a  man  who  found  his  path  to  all 
things  kindly  and  pleasant  blackened  and  barred  sud- 
denly by  the  body  of  a  man  does  not  know  what  it  is 
to  desire  murder.  It  is  idle,  in  short,  for  a  man  who 
has  created  men  to  say  that  he  does  not  understand 
them.  A  man  who  is  a  poet  may,  of  course,  easily 
[239] 


VARIED    TYPES 

make  mistakes  in  these  personal  and  practical  rela- 
tions ;  such  mistakes  and  similar  ones  have  been  made 
by  poets ;  such  mistakes  and  greater  ones  have  been 
made  by  soldiers  and  statesmen  and  men  of  business. 
But  in  so  far  as  a  poet  is  in  these  things  less  of  a 
practical  man  he  is  also  less  of  a  poet. 

If  Shakespeare  really  married  a  bad  wife  when  he 
had  conceived  the  character  of  Beatrice  he  ought  to 
have  been  ashamed  of  himself:  he  had  failed  not  only 
in  his  life,  he  had  failed  in  his  art.  If  Balzac  got  into 
rows  with  his  publishers  he  ought  to  be  rebuked  and 
not  commiserated,  having  evolved  so  many  consistent 
business  men  from  his  own  inside.  The  German  Em- 
peror is  a  poet,  and  therefore  he  succeeds,  because 
poetry  is  so  much  nearer  to  reality  than  all  the  other 
human  occupations.  He  is  a  poet,  and  succeeds  be- 
cause the  majority  of  men  are  poets.  It  is  true,  if 
that  matter  is  at  all  important,  that  the  German  Em- 
peror is  not  a  good  poet.  The  majority  of  men  are 
poets,  only  they  happen  to  be  bad  poets.  The  Ger- 
man Emperor  fails  ridiculously,  if  that  is  all  that  is 
[240] 


THE    GERMAN    EMPEROR 

in  question,  in  almost  every  one  of  the  artistic  occupa- 
tions to  which  he  addresses  himself:  he  is  neither  a 
first-rate  critic,  nor  a  first-rate  musician,  nor  a  first- 
rate  painter,  nor  a  first-rate  poet.  He  is  a  twelfth- 
rate  poet,  but  because  he  is  a  poet  at  all  he  knocks  to 
pieces  all  the  first-rate  politicians  in  the  war  of  poli- 
tics. 

Having  made  clear  my  position  so  far,  I  discover 
with  a  certain  amount  of  interest  that  I  have  not  yet 
got  to  the  subject  of  these  remarks.  The  German 
Emperor  is  a  poet,  and  although,  as  far  as  I  know, 
every  line  he  ever  wrote  may  be  nonsense,  he  is  a  poet 
in  this  real  sense,  that  he  has  realised  the  meaning  of 
every  function  he  has  performed.  Why  should  we 
jeer  at  him  because  he  has  a  great  many  uniforms, 
for  instance?  The  very  essence  of  the  really  imagi- 
native man  is  that  he  realises  the  various  types  or 
capacities  in  which  he  can  appear.  Every  one  of  us, 
or  almost  every  one  of  us,  does  in  reality  fulfil  almost 
as  many  offices  as  Pooh-Bah.  Almost  every  one  of  us 
is  a  ratepayer,  an  immortal  soul,  an  Englishman,  a 
[241] 


VARIED    TYPES 

baptised  person,  a  mammal,  a  minor  poet,  a  juryman, 
a  married  man,  a  bicyclist,  a  Christian,  a  purchaser  of 
newspapers,  and  a  critic  of  Mr.  Alfred  Austin.  We 
ought  to  have  uniforms  for  all  these  things.  How 
beautiful  it  would  be  if  we  appeared  to-morrow  in  the 
uniform  of  a  ratepayer,  in  brown  and  green,  with 
buttons  made  in  the  shape  of  coins,  and  a  blue  income- 
tax  paper  tastefully  arranged  as  a  favour ;  or,  again, 
if  we  appeared  dressed  as  immortal  souls,  in  a  blue 
uniform  with  stars.  It  would  be  very  exciting  to  dress 
up  as  Englishmen,  or  to  go  to  a  fancy  dress  ball  as 
Christians. 

Some  of  the  costumes  I  have  suggested  might 
appear  a  little  more  difficult  to  carry  out.  The 
dress  of  a  person  who  purchases  newspapers  (though 
it  mostly  consists  of  coloured  evening  editions  ar- 
ranged in  a  stitr  skirt,  like  that  of  a  saltatrice,  round 
the  waist  of  the  wearer)  has  many  mysterious  points. 
The  attire  of  a  person  prepared  to  criticise  the  Poet 
Laureate  is  something  so  awful  and  striking  that  I 
dare  not  even  begin  to  describe  it ;  the  one  fact  which 


THE    GERMAN    EMPEROR 

I  am  willing  to  reveal,  and  to  state  seriously  and  re- 
sponsibly, is  that  it  buttons  up  behind. 

But  most  assuredly  we  ought  not  to  abuse  the 
Kaiser  because  he  is  fond  of  patting  on  all  his  uni- 
forms ;  he  does  so  because  he  has  a  large  number  of 
established  and  involuntary  incarnations.  He  tries 
to  do  his  duty  in  that  state  of  life  to  which  it  shall 
please  God  to  call  him ;  and  it  so  happens  that  he  has 
been  called  to  as  many  different  estates  as  there  are 
regiments  in  the  German  Army.  He  is  a  huntsman 
and  proud  of  being  a  huntsman,  an  engineer  and 
proud  of  being  an  engineer,  an  infantry  soldier  and 
proud  of  being  so,  a  light  horseman  and  proud  of 
being  so.  There  is  nothing  wrong  in  all  this ;  the  only 
wrong  thing  is  that  it  should  be  confined  to  the  merely 
destructive  arts  of  war.  The  sight  of  the  German 
Kaiser  in  the  most  magnificent  of  the  uniforms  in 
which  he  had  led  armies  to  victory  is  not  in  itself  so 
splendid  or  delightful  as  that  of  many  other  sights 
which  might  come  before  us  without  a  whisper  of  the 
alarms  of  war.  It  is  not  so  splendid  or  delightful  as 
I  243  ] 


VARIED    TYPES 

the  sight  of  an  ordinary  householder  showing  himself 
in  that  magnificent  uniform  of  purple  and  silver  which 
should  signalise  the  father  of  three  children.  It  is 
not  so  splendid  or  delightful  as  the  appearance  of  a 
young  clerk  in  an  insurance  office  decorated  with  those 
three  long  crimson  plumes  which  are  the  well-known 
insignia  of  a  gentleman  who  is  just  engaged  to  be 
married.  Nor  can  it  compare  with  the  look  of  a  man 
wearing  the  magnificent  green  and  silver  armour  by 
which  we  know  one  who  has  induced  an  acquaintance 
to  give  up  getting  drunk,  or  the  blue  and  gold  which 
is  only  accorded  to  persons  who  have  prevented  fights 
in  the  street.  We  belong  to  quite  as  many  regiments 
as  the  German  Kaiser.  Our  regiments  are  regiments 
that  are  embattled  everywhere;  they  fight  an  unend- 
ing fight  against  all  that  is  hopeless  and  rapacious 
and  of  evil  report.  The  only  difference  is  that  we 
have  the  regiments,  but  not  the  uniforms. 

Only  one  obvious  point  occurs  to  me  to  add.    If  the 
Kaiser  has  more  than  any  other  man  the  sense  of  the 
poetry  of  the  ancient  things,  the  sword,  the  crown, 
[244] 


THE    GERMAN    EMPEROR 

the  ship,  the  nation,  he  has  the  sense  of  the  poetry 
of  modern  things  also.  He  has  one  sense,  and  it  is 
even  a  joke  against  him.  He  feels  the  poetry  of  one 
thing  that  is  more  poetic  than  sword  or  crown  or  ship 
or  nation,  the  poetry  of  the  telegram.  No  one  ever 
sent  a  telegram  who  did  not  feel  like  a  god.  He  is 
a  god,  for  he  is  a  minor  poet ;  a  minor  poet,  but  a  poet 
still. 


[245] 


TENNYSON 


TENNYSON 

MR.  MORTON  LUCE  has  written  a  short 
study  of  Tennyson  which  has  consider- 
able cultivation  and  suggestiveness, 
which  will  be  sufficient  to  serve  as  a  notebook  for  Ten- 
nyson's admirers,  but  scarcely  sufficient,  perhaps,  to 
serve  as  a  pamphlet  against  his  opponents.  If  a  critic 
has,  as  he  ought  to  have,  any  of  the  functions  anciently 
attributed  to  a  prophet,  it  ought  not  to  be  difficult  for 
him  to  prophesy  that  Tennyson  will  pass  through  a 
period  of  facile  condemnation  and  neglect  before  we 
arrive  at  the  true  appreciation  of  his  work.  The 
same  thing  has  happened  to  the  most  vigorous  of 
essayists,  Macaulay,  and  the  most  vigorous  of  ro- 
mancers, Dickens,  because  we  live  in  a  time  when  mere 
vigour  is  considered  a  vulgar  thing.  The  same  idle 
and  frigid  reaction  will  almost  certainly  discredit  the 
stateliness  and  care  of  Tennyson,  as  it  has  discredited 
[249] 


VARIED    TYPES 

the  recklessness  and  inventiveness  of  Dickens.  It  is 
only  necessary  to  remember  that  no  action  can  be  dis- 
credited by  a  reaction. 

The  attempts  which  have  been  made  to  discredit  the 
poetical  position  of  Tennyson  are  in  the  main  dictated 
by  an  entire  nii«i|iMlgf»tM|^fipg  of  the  nature  of 
poetry.  When  critics  like  Matthew  Arnold,  for  ex- 
ample, suggest  that  his  poetry  is  deficient  in  elaborate 
thought,  they  only  prove,  as  Matthew  Arnold  proved, 
that  they  themselves  could  never  be  great  poets.  It 
is  no  valid  accusation  against  a  poet  that  the  senti- 
ment he  expresses  is  commonplace.  Poetry  is  always 
commonplace;  it  is  vulgar  in  the  noblest  sense  of  thai 
noble  word.  Unless  a  man  can  make  the  same  kind 
of  ringing  appeal  to  absolute  and  admitted  sentiments 
that  is  made  by  a  popular  orator,  he  has  lost  touch 
with  emotional  literature.  Unless  he  is  to  some  extent 
a  demagogue,  he  cannot  be  a  poet.  A  man  who  ex- 
presses in  poetry  new  and  strange  and  undiscovered 
emotions  is  not  a  poet;  he  is  a  brain  specialist.  Ten- 
nyson can  never  be  discredited  before  any  serious 


TENNYSON 

tribunal  of  criticism  because  the  sentiments  and 
thoughts  to  which  he  dedicates  himself  are  those  senti- 
ments and  thoughts  which  occur  to  anyone.  These 
are  the  peculiar  province  of  poetry;  poetry,  like  re- 
ligion, is  always  a  democratic  thing,  even  if  it  pre- 
tends the  contrary.  The  faults  of  Tennyson,  so  far 
as  they  existed,  were  not  half  so  much  in  the  common 
character  of  his  sentiments  as  in  the  arrogant  perfec- 
tion of  his  workmanship.  He  was  not  by  any  means 
so  wrong  in  his  faults  as  he  was  in  his  perfections. 

Men  are  very  much  too  ready  to  speak  of  men's 
work  being  ordinary,  when  we  consider  that,  properly 
considered,  every  man  is  extraordinary.  The  average 
man  is  a  tribal  fable,  like  the  Man-Wolf  or  the  Wise 
Man  of  the  Stoics.  In  every  man's  heart  there  is  a 
revolution ;  how  much  more  in  every  poet's?  The  su- 
preme business  of  criticism  is  to  discover  that  part  of 
a  man's  work  which  is  his  and  to  ignore  that  part 
which  belongs  to  others.  Why  should  any  critic  of 
poetry  spend  time  and  attention  on  that  part  of  a 
man's  work  which  is  unpoetical?  Why  should  any 
[251] 


VARIED    TYPES 

man  be  interested  in  aspects  which  are  uninteresting  ? 
The  business  of  a  critic  is  to  discover  the  importance 
of  men  and  not  their  crimes.  It  is  true  that  the  Greek 
word  critic  carries  with  it  the  meaning  of  a  judge,  and 
up  to  this  point  of  history  judges  have  had  to  do  with 
the  valuation  of  men's  sins,  and  not  with  the  valuation 
of  their  virtues. 

Tennyson's  work,  disencumbered  of  all  that  unin- 
teresting accretion  which  he  had  inherited  or  copied, 
resolves  itself,  like  that  of  any  other  man  of  genius, 
into  those  things  which  he  really  inaugurated.  Under- 
neath all  his  exterior  of  polished  and  polite  rectitude 
there  was  in  him  a  genuine  fire  of  novelty ;  only  that, 
like  all  the  able  men  of  his  period,  he  disguised  revolu- 
tion under  the  name  of  evolution.  He  is  only  a  very 
shallow  critic  who  cannot  see  an  eternal  rebel  in  the 
heart  of  the  Conservative. 

Tennyson  had  certain  absolutely  personal  ideas,  as 

much  his  own  as  the  ideas  of  Browning  or  Meredith, 

though  they  were  fewer  in  number.    One  of  these,  for 

example,  was  the  fact  that  he  was  the  first  of  all  poets 

[252] 


TENNYSON 

(and  perhaps  the  last)  to  attempt  to  treat  poetically 
that  vast  and  monstrous  vision  of  fact  which  science 
had  recently  revealed  to  mankind.  Scientific  discov- 
eries seem  commonly  fables  as  fantastic  in  the  ears  of 
poets  as  poems  in  the  ears  of  men  of  science.  The 
poet  is  always  a  Ptolemaist;  for  him  the  sun  still 
rises  and  the  earth  stands  still.  Tennyson  really 
worked  the  essence  of  modern  science  into  his  poetical 
constitution,  so  that  its  appalling  birds  and  frightful 
flowers  were  really  part  of  his  literary  imagery.  To 
him  blind  and  brutal  monsters,  the  products  of  the 
wild  babyhood  of  the  Universe,  were  as  the  daisies  and 
the  nightingales  were  to  Keats ;  he  absolutely  realised 
the  great  literary  paradox  mentioned  in  the  Book  of 
Job :  "  He  saw  Behemoth,  and  he  played  with  him 
as  with  a  bird." 

Instances  of  this  would  not  be  difficult  to  find. 
But  the  tests  of  poetry  are  those  instances  in  which 
this  outrageous  scientific  phraseology  becomes  natural 
and  unconscious.  Tennyson  wrote  one  of  his  own  ex- 
quisite lyrics  describing  the  exultation  of  a  lover  on 
[253] 


VARIED    TYPES 

the  evening  before  his  bridal  day.  This  would  be  an 
occasion,  if  ever  there  was  one,  for  falling  back  on 
those  ancient  and  assured  falsehoods  of  the  domed 
heaven  and  the  flat  earth  in  which  generations  of 
poets  have  made  us  feel  at  home.  We  can  imagine  the 
poet  in  such  a  lyric  saluting  the  setting  sun  and 
prophesying  the  sun's  resurrection.  There  is  some- 
thing extraordinarily  typical  of  Tennyson's  scientific 
faith  in  the  fact  that  this,  one  of  the  most  sentimental 
and  elemental  of  his  poems,  opens  with  the  two  lines : 

"  Move  eastward,  happy  earth,  and  leave 
Yon  orange  sunset  waning  slow." 

Rivers  had  often  been  commanded  to  flow  by  poets, 
and  flowers  to  blossom  in  their  season,  and  both  were 
doubtless  grateful  for  the  permission.  But  the  ter- 
restrial globe  of  science  has  only  twice,  so  far  as  we 
know,  been  encouraged  in  poetry  to  continue  its  course, 
one  instance  being  that  of  this  poem,  and  the  other 
the  incomparable  "  Address  to  the  Terrestrial  Globe  " 
in  the  "  Bab  Ballads." 

There  was,  again,  another  poetic  element  entirely 


TENNYSON 

peculiar  to  Tennyson,  which  his  critics  have,  in  many 
cases,  ridiculously  confused  with  a  fault.  This  was 
the  fact  that  Tennyson  stood  alone  among  modern 
poets  in  the  attempt  to  give  a  poetic  character  to  the 
conception  of  Liberal  Conservatism,  of  splendid  com- 
promise. The  carping  critics  who  have  abused  Ten- 
nyson for  this  do  not  see  that  it  was  far  more  daring 
and  original  for  a  poet  to  defend  conventionality  than 
to  defend  a  cart-load  of  revolutions.  His  really  sound 
and  essential  conception  of  Liberty, 

"  Turning  to  scorn  with  lips  divine 
The  falsehood  of  extremes," 

is  as  good  a  definition  of  Liberalism  as  has  been  ut- 
tered in  poetry  in  the  Liberal  century.  Moderation 
is  not  a  compromise ;  moderation  is  a  passion ;  the  pas- 
sion of  great  judges.  That  Tennyson  felt  that  lyrical 
enthusiasm  could  be  devoted  to  established  customs, 
to  indefensible  and  ineradicable  national  constitutions, 
to  the  dignity  of  time  and  the  empire  of  unutterable 
common  sense,  all  this  did  not  make  him  a  tamer  poet, 
but  an  infinitely  more  original  one.  Any  poetaster 
[255] 


VARIED    TYPES 

can  describe  a  thunderstorm ;  it  requires  a  poet  to  de- 
scribe the  ancient  and  quiet  sky. 

I  cannot,  indeed,  fall  in  with  Mr.  Morton  Luce  in 
his  somewhat  frigid  and  patrician  theory  of  poetry. 
"  Dialect,"  he  says,  "  mostly  falls  below  the  dignity 
of  art."  I  cannot  feel  myself  that  art  has  any  dignity 
higher  than  the  indwelling  and  divine  dignity  of  hu- 
man nature.  Great  poets  like  Burns  were  far  more 
undignified  when  they  clothed  their  thoughts  in  what 
Mr.  Morton  Luce  calls  "  the  seemly  raiment  of  cul- 
tured speech  "  than  when  they  clothed  them  in  the 
headlong  and  flexible  patois  in  which  they  thought 
and  prayed  and  quarrelled  and  made  love.  If  Tenny- 
son failed  (which  I  do  not  admit)  in  such  poems  as 
"  The  Northern  Farmer,"  it  was  not  because  he  used 
too  much  of  the  spirit  of  the  dialect,  but  because  he 
used  too  little. 

Tennyson  belonged  undoubtedly  to  a  period  from 

which  we  are  divided;  the  period  in  which  men  had 

queer  ideas  of  the  antagonism  of  science  and  religion ; 

the  period  in  which  the  Missing  Link  was  really  miss- 

[256] 


TENNYSON 

ing.  But  his  hold  upon  the  old  realities  of  existence 
never  wavered ;  he  was  the  apostle  of  the  sanctity  of 
laws,  of  the  sanctity  of  customs ;  above  all,  like 
every  poet,  he  was  the  apostle  of  the  sanctity  of 
words. 


[257] 


ELIZABETH  BARRETT  BROWNING 


ELIZABETH  BARRETT  BROWNING 


1 


delightful  new  edition  of  Mrs.  Brown- 
ing's "  Casa  Guidi  Windows  "  which  Mr. 
John  Lane  has  just  issued  ought  certainly 
to  serve  as  an  opportunity  for  the  serious  criticism 
and  inevitable  admiration  to  which  a  great  poet  is  en- 
titled. For  Mrs.  Browning  was  a  great  poet,  and 
not,  as  is  idly  and  vulgarly  supposed,  only  a  great 
poetess.  The  word  poetess  is  bad  English,  and  it  con- 
veys a  particularly  bad  compliment.  Nothing  is  more 
remarkable  about  Mrs.  Browning's  work  than  the  ab- 
sence of  that  trite  and  namby-pamby  elegance  which 
the  last  two  centuries  demanded  from  lady  writers. 
Wherever  her  verse  is  bad  it  is  bad  from  some  extrav- 
agance of  imagery,  some  violence  of  comparison, 
some  kind  of  debauch  of  cleverness.  Her  nonsense 
never  arises  from  weakness,  but  from  a  confusion  of 
[261] 


VARIED    TYPES 

powers.     If  the  phrase  explain  itself,  she  is  far  more 
a  great  poet  than  she  is  a  good  one. 

Mrs.  Browning  often  appears  more  luscious  and 
sentimental  than  many  other  literary  women,  but  this 
was  because  she  was  stronger.  It  requires  a  certain 
amount  of  internal  force  to  break  down.  A  complete 
self-humiliation  requires  enormous  strength,  more 
strength  than  most  of  us  possess.  When  she  was  writ- 
ing the  poetry  of  self-abandonment  she  really  aban- 
doned herself  with  the  valour  and  decision  of  an  an- 
chorite abandoning  the  world.  Such  a  couplet  as : 

"  Our  Euripides,  the  human, 
With  his  dropping  of  warm  tears," 

gives  to  most  of  us  a  sickly  and  nauseous  sensation. 
Nothing  can  be  well  conceived  more  ridiculous  than 
Euripides  going  about  dropping  tears  with  a  loud 
splash,  and  Mrs.  Browning  coming  after  him  with 
a  thermometer.  But  the  one  emphatic  point  about 
this  idiotic  couplet  is  that  Mrs.  Hemans  would  never 
have  written  it.  She  would  have  written  something 
perfectly  dignified,  perfectly  harmless,  perfectly  in- 
[262] 


ELIZABETH    B.    BROWNING 

considerable.  Mrs.  Browning  was  in  a  great  and  seri- 
ous difficulty.  She  really  meant  something.  She 
aimed  at  a  vivid  and  curious  image,  and  she  missed  it. 
She  had  that  catastrophic  and  public  failure  which  is, 
as  much  as  a  medal  or  a  testimonial,  the  badge  of  the 
brave. 

In  spite  of  the  tiresome  half-truth  that  art  is  un- 
moral, the  arts  require  a  certain  considerable  number 
of  moral  qualities,  and  more  especially  all  the  arts  re- 
quire courage.  The  art  of  drawing,  for  example,  re- 
quires even  a  kind  of  physical  courage.  Anyone  who 
has  tried  to  draw  a  straight  line  and  failed  knows  that 
he  fails  chiefly  in  nerve,  as  he  might  fail  to  jump  off 
a  cliff.  And  similarly  all  great  literary  art  involves 
the  element  of  risk,  and  the  greatest  literary  artists 
have  commonly  been  those  who  have  run  the  greatest 
risk  of  talking  nonsense.  Almost  all  great  poets  rant, 
from  Shakespeare  downwards.  Mrs.  Browning  was 
Elizabethan  in  her  luxuriance  and  her  audacity,  and 
the  gigantic  scale  of  her  wit.  We  often  feel  with  her 
as  we  feel  with  Shakespeare,  that  she  would  have  done 
[263] 


VARIED    TYPES 

better  with  half  as  much  talent.  The  great  curse  of 
the  Elizabethans  is  upon  her,  that  she  cannot  leave 
anything  alone,  she  cannot  write  a  single  line  without 
a  conceit : 

"  And  the  eyes  of  the  peacock  fans 
Winked  at  the  alien  glory," 

she  said  of  the  Papal  fans  in  the  presence  of  the 
Italian  tricolour: 

"And  a  royal  blood  sends  glances  up  her  princely  eye  to  trouble. 
And  the  shadow  of  a  monarch's  crown  is  softened  in  her  hair," 

is  her  description  of  a  beautiful  and  aristocratic  lady. 
The  notion  of  peacock  feathers  winking  like  so  many 
London  urchins  is  perhaps  one  of  her  rather  aggress- 
ive and  outrageous  figures  of  speech.  The  image  of  a 
woman's  hair  as  the  softened  shadow  of  a  crown  is  a 
singularly  vivid  and  perfect  one.  But  both  have  the 
same  quality  of  intellectual  fancy  and  intellectual  con- 
centration. They  are  both  instances  of  a  sort  of 
ethereal  epigram.  This  is  the  great  and  dominant 
characteristic  of  Mrs.  Browning,  that  she  was  sig- 
nificant alike  in  failure  and  success.  Just  as  every 
[264] 


ELIZABETH    B.    BROWNING 

marriage  in  the  world,  good  or  bad,  is  a  marriage, 
dramatic,  irrevocable,  and  big  with  coming  events,  so 
every  one  of  her  wild  weddings  between  alien  ideas  is 
an  accomplished  fact  which  produces  a  certain  effect 
on  the  imagination,  which  has  for  good  or  evil  become 
part  and  parcel  of  our  mental  vision  forever.  She 
gives  the  reader  the  impression  that  she  never  declined 
a  fancy,  just  as  some  gentlemen  of  the  eighteenth 
century  never  declined  a  duel.  When  she  fell  it  was 
always  because  she  missed  the  foothold,  never  because 
she  funked  the  leap. 

"  Casa  Guidi  Windows  "  is,  in  one  aspect,  a  poem 
very  typical  of  its  author.  Mrs.  Browning  may  fairly 
be  called  the  peculiar  poet  of  Liberalism,  of  that  great 
movement  of  the  first  half  of  the  nineteenth  century 
towards  the  emancipation  of  men  from  ancient  insti- 
tutions which  had  gradually  changed  their  nature, 
from  the  houses  of  refuge  which  had  turned  into  dun- 
geons, and  the  mystic  jewels  which  remained  only  as 
fetters.  It  was  not  what  we  ordinarily  understand  by 
revolt.  It  had  no  hatred  in  its  heart  for  ancient  and 
[265] 


VARIED    TYPES 

essentially  human  institutions.  It  had  that  deeply 
conservative  belief  in  the  most  ancient  of  institutions, 
the  average  man,  which  goes  by  the  name  of  democ- 
racy. It  had  none  of  the  spirit  of  modern  Imperialism 
which  is  kicking  a  man  because  he  is  down.  But,  on 
the  other  hand,  it  had  none  of  the  spirit  of  modern 
Anarchism  and  scepticism  which  is  kicking  a  man 
merely  because  he  is  up.  It  was  based  fundamentally 
on  a  belief  in  the  destiny  of  humanity,  whether  that 
belief  took  an  irreligious  form,  as  in  Swinburne,  or  a 
religious  form,  as  in  Mrs.  Browning.  It  had  that 
rooted  and  natural  conviction  that  the  Millennium 
was  coming  to-morrow  which  has  been  the  conviction 
of  all  iconoclasts  and  reformers,  and  for  which  some 
rationalists  have  been  absurd  enough  to  blame  the 
early  Christians.  But  they  had  none  of  that  disposi- 
tion to  pin  their  whole  faith  to  some  black-and-white 
scientific  system  which  afterwards  became  the  curse  of 
philosophical  Radicalism.  They  were  not  like  the 
sociologists  who  lay  down  a  final  rectification  of  things, 
amounting  to  nothing  except  an  end  of  the  world,  a 
[266] 


ELIZABETH    B.    BROWNING 

great  deal  more  depressing  than  would  be  the  case  if 
it  were  knocked  to  pieces  by  a  comet.  Their  ideal, 
like  the  ideal  of  all  sensible  people,  was  a  chaotic  and 
confused  notion  of  goodness  made  up  of  English  prim- 
roses and  Greek  statues,  birds  singing  in  April,  and 
regiments  being  cut  to  pieces  for  a  flag.  They  were 
neither  Radicals  nor  Socialists,  but  Liberals,  and  a 
Liberal  is  a  noble  and  indispensable  lunatic  who  tries 
to  make  a  cosmos  of  his  own  head. 

Mrs.  Browning  and  her  husband  were  more  liberal 
than  most  Liberals.  Theirs  was  the  hospitality  of  the 
intellect  and  the  hospitality  of  the  heart,  which  is  the 
best  definition  of  the  term.  They  never  fell  into  the 
habit  of  the  idle  revolutionists  of  supposing  that  the 
past  was  bad  because  the  future  was  good,  which 
amounted  to  asserting  that  because  humanity  had 
never  made  anything  but  mistakes  it  was  now  quite 
certain  to  be  right.  Browning  possessed  in  a  greater 
degree  than  any  other  man  the  power  of  realising 
that  all  conventions  were  only  victorious  revolutions. 
He  could  follow  the  mediaeval  logicians  in  all  their 
[267] 


VARIED    TYPES 

sowing  of  the  wind  and  reaping  of  the  whirlwind  with 
all  that  generous  ardour  which  is  due  to  abstract 
ideas.  He  could  study  the  ancients  with  the  young 
eyes  of  the  Renaissance  and  read  a  Greek  grammar 
like  a  book  of  love  lyrics.  This  immense  and  almost 
confounding  Liberalism  of  Browning  doubtless  had 
some  effect  upon  his  wife.  In  her  vision  of  New  Italy 
she  went  back  to  the  image  of  Ancient  Italy  like  an 
honest  and  true  revolutionist;  for  does  not  the  very 
word  "  revolution  "  mean  a  rolling  backward.  All 
true  revolutions  are  reversions  to  the  natural  and  the 
normal.  A  revolutionist  who  breaks  with  the  past  is 
a  notion  fit  for  an  idiot.  For  how  could  a  man  even 
wish  for  something  which  he  had  never  heard  of? 
Mrs.  Browning's  inexhaustible  sympathy  with  all  the 
ancient  and  essential  passions  of  humanity  was  no- 
where more  in  evidence  than  in  her  conception  of  pa- 
triotism. For  some  dark  reason,  which  it  is  difficult 
indeed  to  fathom,  belief  in  patriotism  in  our  day  is 
held  to  mean  principally  a  belief  in  every  other  nation 
abandoning  its  patriotic  feelings.  In  the  case  of  no 
[268] 


ELIZABETH    B.    BROWNING 

other  passion  does  this  weird  contradiction  exist.  Men 
whose  lives  are  mainly  based  upon  friendship  sympa- 
thise with  the  friendships  of  others.  The  interest  of 
engaged  couples  in  each  other  is  a  proverb,  and  like 
many  other  proverbs  sometimes  a  nuisance.  In  pa- 
triotism alone  it  is  considered  correct  just  now  to  as- 
sume that  the  sentiment  does  not  exist  in  other  people. 
It  was  not  so  with  the  great  Liberals  of  Mrs.  Brown- 
ing's time.  The  Brownings  had,  so  to  speak,  a  dis- 
embodied talent  for  patriotism.  They  loved  England 
and  they  loved  Italy ;  yet  they  were  the  very  reverse 
of  cosmopolitans.  They  loved  the  two  countries  as 
countries,  not  as  arbitrary  divisions  of  the  globe. 
They  had  hold  of  the  root  and  essence  of  patriotism. 
They  knew  how  certain  flowers  and  birds  and  rivers 
pass  into  the  mills  of  the  brain  and  come  out  as  wars 
and  discoveries,  and  how  some  triumphant  adventure 
or  some  staggering  crime  wrought  in  a  remote  conti- 
nent may  bear  about  it  the  colour  of  an  Italian  city 
or  the  soul  of  a  silent  village  of  Surrey. 

[269] 


V 


L|BRARY  FACILITY 


A     000137832     2 


